


Escape Velocity

by trajectory



Series: Repercussions [1]
Category: The Transformers (IDW Generation One), Transformers - All Media Types
Genre: Background Swindle/Blurr, Canon-Typical Violence, Fraught Intimacy, M/M, Post-Canon, Post-Unicron, The Ongoing Combaticon Soap Opera, Unhealthy Relationships, non-consensual mind alteration, past dubious consent
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-03-09
Updated: 2019-03-09
Packaged: 2019-11-14 07:22:48
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 28,248
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18048125
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/trajectory/pseuds/trajectory
Summary: Onslaught and Blast Off face the lasting consequences of their actions, Swindle picks up on more than expected, Brawl decides on a straightforward approach, and Vortex? Vortex might just be more than a teeny bit peeved that he isn’t committing a murderright now.





	Escape Velocity

**Author's Note:**

> I recently heard about some of the dropped-due-to-the-early-cancellation TAAO plot points for the other Combaticons' reacting to Blast Off/Onslaught and the truth being revealed and now that the comic's over, I decided to see if I could make them work. Thanks goes to my beta reader for her help!
> 
> As a fair warning, in addition to the above tags, this story has in it: canon divergence, minor character death, questionable morality, underlying twisted feelings, possessiveness towards a partner, emotional manipulation, talking about consent issues, and drinking. There are also mentions of untreated alcoholism, past sexual interfacing, and past genocide and war crimes. If any of this isn’t up your alley as a reader, this is where you turn around.

Blast Off was the only one of the team who had decided he wanted unnecessary frame changes after the war ended. Onslaught was aware of this because every member of the team who wasn’t named Swindle were trained, war or no war, to report major frame changes to him to sign off on before doing them, and Blast Off had done so diligently.

They had been straightforward: tucking away in his leg cannon mods so they were no longer on visible display for those soft, _ignorant_ colony civilians to ogle, blunting off the sharp fins that protruded from his shoulders and removing the spikes on his feet, un-installing a handful of low-priority combat subroutines, a downscaling of his root mode to a small size that demanded less fuel to keep running. Cheap modifications, nothing special: they had been running low on shanix. He remained a well-armed warframe primed with integrated weaponry but not as obviously to the degree he had been in the thick of the war.

But even if his root mode had shrunken, mass shifting ensured his alt mode remained the same size as it had been before. He could fit passengers.

Riding inside Blast Off was an experience new to none of them.

Being pinned square against the back of the cargo hull in the mid-deck area because Blast Off didn’t have time to engage the artificial gravity as his engines howled, strained to their limits, hurtling upwards and fighting to maintain the speed to break the atmosphere, the curved walls vibrating violently all over, shaking, trembling, lockers rattling, seat harnesses floating uselessly? That very much _was_.

Between the gaps of Vortex’s rotors and Brawl’s foot, the Combaticons watched through the porthole as Unicron tore Cybertron asunder.

“Frag. Primus, frag,” Vortex let his helm clang against the interior, red visor narrowed. “That’s not something you see every day. I thought they were messing around when they said it was the end of the world, they’ve said that line every time a new problem came up. The _fragger’s_ eating Cybertron. Munching on it like an energon goodie! What the frag?”

Brawl had more immediate concerns. He wailed. “That means he’s getting the bar too!”

“Not _now_ , mech,” voice muffled from being pinned under Onslaught’s greater weight, Swindle dug an elbow into Brawl’s stomach plating. “Seriously, think of something other than where you’re getting your next bottle of engex!”

Brawl swore at him, saying he wasn’t just thinking about that, frag you. Vortex clattered his rotors, clipping somebody’s finger and getting a hiss out of them. “What the _frag_. How did the big guy happen? Things like that don’t come out of nowhere!”

“Dunno, don’t think anybody wants to get close enough to Unicron to ask. Unless they’re a crazy Autobot.”

Swindle drawled. “No way even an _Autobot_ would wanna’ go near _that_ thing.”

“Not even a crazy one with a cracked processor. _Look_ at it.”

Brawl scrunched up his visor. Another continent tore off Cybertron’s grey shell and was sucked into Unicron’s comically giant maw. “Its mouth looks bigger than the Sonic Canyons, I think it’s—”

“Will you imbeciles be QUIET!”

Glued in place by gravity, Onslaught bellowed and revved his engine in a bid to silence them, the vibrations lost amidst the quaking of the shuttle flying up and up and up. And up until the shaking died down and the roaring of gaining altitude hushed and the floor started levelling off. Lights clicked on. It was quiet in space. Blast Off engaged the artificial gravity like an ex-vent at the end of a long sprint. Sliding down the wall to huddle on the dark brown and purple floor of the shuttle, the team quaked.

“Escape from Unicron’s gravitational pull has been successful,” Blast Off’s voice was tired when it came crackling over his speakers. It didn’t have the strength to reverberate like it normally would to the mechs carried inside his hold. Wincing, Brawl heaved himself to his feet before reaching down and pulling up Swindle by the shoulder tire. Vortex staggered upright. “And _Cybertron’s_ gravitational pull is... rapidly becoming no longer be a concern. Unicron does not appear to be advancing towards our position. We have a moment’s reprieve, but there’s not going to be a planet for me to plot an orbit around soon. Orders?”

Vortex glanced at Onslaught. “Sooo—what are we going to do?”

Onslaught’s visor twitched at the bottom edge. He addressed Vortex, “What’s the status of the rest of the fleet in orbit?”

There was an uneasy pause. Vortex crossed his arms, keen optics flickering from him to the direction of the cabin at the front of the shuttle, then back to him again. He reset his vocalizer with a click, a sneer coming out. “You’re the one with the long-distance comm equipment on board, Blasters, not us. What’s the deal out there.” The faint buzz of commlinks activating told them that Blast Off had opened a channel.

“The majority of the fleet has been…. taken away. In a...” Blast Off paused as the frequencies busied with activity and then forged ahead, “A mass teleportation sequence?”

Brawl’s electromagnetic field spiked in confusion. “Hang on, I thought they were gonna gear up and _attack_ that Unicron thing? Why did they change their mind and run away?”

Blast Off reported emotionlessly, “Several ships and battlecruisers were missed like we were by the sequence, but everybody else in the fleet and the remaining population on Cybertron have been moved somewhere else. According to them, us stragglers in orbit are too few for Unicron to take notice of.” He stopped and listened to the comms’ transmissions again. He continued listlessly: “Metroplex has activated his spacebridge. There’s nothing left on Cybertron, but the dead.”

And behind them, Unicron roared.

A flare like a sun going out blinded them.

Rebooting his optics to get rid of the dots swirling across them, Swindle said dryly. “Lemme give you a quick correction of the numbers involved. There’s nothing of Cybertron left, _period_.”

Brawl pointed at the porthole. His armor plating shuffled. “What’s happening to space? It’s gone weird.”

“What?” Onslaught leaned over to see what Brawl was babbling on about now. He went still, a hand tightening on his knee. “The stars.”

Brawl’s dark green plating clamped tight to his frame. “They’re gone! That was what weirded me out! Stars shouldn’t be just vanishing, like that… ? It’s not just me? That’s a lot of them blinked out behind where that monster was. I don’t get how that works.”

Onslaught didn’t respond, gaze locked on the field of space rubble where Cybertron once was.

The colossal grinding noises as Unicron folded into its planet mode and went sailing away into the darkness made the Combaticons clap their hands over their audials. Blast Off wobbled in his course before he maneuvered around a stray piece of floating debris and changed his flight path to keep pace with the rest of the small group of fleet stragglers.

“Four million years of war over who gets to run the planet and then some giant monster none of us know scrap about flies in from space and eats it.” Vortex flopped back on a seat and flung out his arms sarcastically. “Woo-hoo. Is this a ‘take _that_ , Cybertronians’ from the universe at large? That’s stupid. That’s so stupid it’s sort of hilarious. Talk about an anti-climax.”

“Shut up, Tex. Of course you’d think that’s funny,” Swindle rubbed his optics with the back of his hand. “Onslaught, do you have a plan?”

“Who do you take me for? I always have a plan,” Onslaught snapped, not looking away from the porthole.

“Hey! What’s the other ships saying? They’re still there?” Brawl interrupted, anxiety overcoming anger despite Onslaught’s glower, talking to the speakers.

“The galactic coordinates they’ve been given to converge upon and regroup with the part of the fleet that was teleported are…” Blast Off groaned, an emotion besides miserable exhaustion finally showing up in his tone. “That organic backwater. The Earth place.”

Vortex canted his helm. “That wet lump of dirt?”

“They’re saying it’s where Unicron’s going too.”

“Aww. That’s not close to Cybertron. We’ll be too slow. We’re gonna miss all the action if Unicron gets there first,” Brawl’s whining was grating.

Onslaught growled and turned to face Brawl. “What would Unicron possibly want with Earth?”

“Earth’s a colony, and Unicron’s been chomping up all the colonies it can,” Swindle pointed out.

Vortex crackled, engine rumbling. “Earth’s not a proper _colony_ , it’s all uppity organics and some stray mechs who like ‘em too much. And it’s got Soundwave’s lost-and-found home in space for softsparks. No way that counts.”

Brawl said, “Prime annexed it, I bet that counts.”

Patience running out, Onslaught cut off the bickering at the root. “If that’s where Unicron is headed for its next meal, that’s where we’re going as well.” The domineering cloak of his field dared them to argue. A wave of muttering passed through the Combaticons. None of them spoke up. Onslaught tipped up his chin, “We’re going to Earth.” He sat down, folded his arms across his chest plating and let his visor go dark.

“Hold up. Is there even enough fuel onboard to make an interstellar trip? Do we need to make a pit-stop en route first?” Swindle asked, holding up a hand.

Quiet blanketed the group.

“Fuel levels are sufficient,” rasped Blast Off over his speakers. The feed cut off. It was customary for the officer in charge of the mission to take the cabin on the flight deck. Onslaught had done so in the past. He remained in his seat.

**////**

Vortex paced in circles up and down the cargo hull. Restless energy burned in his movements, the rush of chemicals bubbling through his fuel lines from the madcap rush to join in the evacuations from the planet not yet burnt off. Swindle zoned out, and for once, Brawl didn’t have the energy for causing a ruckus.

“I hope this isn’t giving you ideas, Blast Off,” he tossed out.

The shuttle’s attention stirred away from flying. The other Combaticons looked on.

“You being our ticket off Cybertron before we ended up part of big and ugly’s latest snack, that is,” His blades fanned out on his back, slicing the stale air. Unlike before, there was no playfulness in his dark tone. “This hasn’t earned you an ounce of good will in my books.”

“Ah,” Blast Off sounded flat, disconnected. “No. Of course not. I’m not going to delude myself into thinking otherwise.”

Vortex’s banked but shimmering anger was all the more evident for the soft cadence of his words.

“ _Good_.”

The back of Onslaught’s neck prickled.

**////**

“Swindle had dirt on Starscream,” Blast Off said without prompting some time later.

Slumped over in one of the seat harnesses, Swindle’s glowing optics were dimmed, resetting every other minute or so. He was low on fuel and struggling to not doze off. One of his wheels was misaligned. Several dents and dings laced his lower midsection from an earlier run-in with law enforcement who hadn’t been against the opportunity to take a gang of wanted fugitives into custody. The dents were bothering him again since they hadn’t exactly been in a position to stop for a medic and he didn’t want the other Combaticons to know. Onslaught figured the little cyberweasel was currently steeped in mourning for all his financial investments on Cybertron going up in dust.

Swindle twitched. “Huh?”

Vortex plopped a fist into his palm. His visor brightened. “A-ha! Is that one of the naughty backroom deals that had Starscream spilling his bolts at the election debates?”

Swindle shuffled his feet, scowling. “Oh. That. You mean the stuff Starscream confessed to.”

“Yes. Starscream ran a false flag operation on Caminus,” Blast Off said blankly. His engines thrummed. No sharpness lurked in his words. “You recorded the bargain he cut with you to do it. Then you hid the recording, and went off on your jaunt to use a combiner and loot a colony so poor in resources it was begging _us_ for scraps. And then you got yourself shot in the spark.”

“Oi! That wasn’t on purpose!” Swindle spat an affronted sound from his vocalizer. Blast Off ignored it and continued.

“That’s why we combined with you. Onslaught wanted it for evidence.”

Apparently he had decided, the most damning lie exposed steaming to the open air, full disclosure was the route to take refuge in.

“I went looking for it, after everybody woke up,” Blast Off said softly, like he had forgotten they were there. A note of disgust entered his voice. “I thought… Too late by then, I should’ve expected that. You were probably the first one Airachnid went to work on, needles rifling through your memory banks. Starscream got the location. He wiped out the evidence long before I got there.” Sadness ghosted over the speakers. “So, the intel was pointless in the end.”

Vortex whistled. “Starscream covered his tracks like a grown bot! Who knew.”

Out of the corner of his visor, Onslaught saw Brawl push off from the wall he’d been leaning against and lumber towards Swindle. _That_ was a recent development, dating back to their disastrous first merge. Something about the experience had turned Brawl downright protective towards the jeep. Onslaught was yet to understand why.

“Meaning,” Swindle’s field didn’t quite cover up the discord under the unaffected attitude he draped over it. The pulses in the lines of his biolights flickered. “In laymechs’ terms, none of you did it to save me?”

His gaze dropped to the spot on his chest where the weldings had been. Brawl put a hand on his shoulder.

“Swindle,” Blast Off said dully and rolled over. The Combaticons clenched at their seats. “You were as good as dead, and none of us know a single thing about fixing brain modules, never mind manually patching them up through combination.” Electronic static crawled thickly through his words as he righted himself. “We would have come for you if you were alive to take back, but Decepticons don’t go back for their _dead_.”

**////**

At some point, red optics half-shuttered behind his visor and slender blades drooping, Vortex had scooted closer and closer to Brawl, then dropped a bundle of helicopter into the tank’s lap, engine purring slyly. Spotting the opportunity, Swindle had shaken off his gloomy mood and gotten in on it, sidling in and wiggling until the con-mech was comfortably draped on top of Brawl too, over Brawl’s loud grumbling and a half-hearted swat at the jeep’s shoulder from Vortex, too tired to put real effort into it, over the scraping clinks of frames jostling around and armor edges hitting each other. And now the three of them were recharging in an exhausted heap together, submerged in the sensation that only came from having another teammate alive and physically close to them, plating pressed to plating, reassuring their systems of the rightness derived from contact and touch and comfort. Thanks to the bond, even the venting of their fans worked together, expelling wafts of heated, stale air in and out in unison.

Onslaught resisted the spark-deep lure they presented. He had to stay alert. None of his subordinates were up to swapping in for sentry duty, he told himself. If that meant staying awake for the duration of the space flight, so be it. He had stayed awake for longer periods under worse conditions before.

He wouldn’t drop his guard. Not here.

The sprawling clouds of stars outside floated past the porthole in glittering blurs and smears of colors. They skittered around the edge of a towering orange nebula, silhouetted by spills of otherworldly blue. The lights inside the shuttle paled in comparison. He turned his helm and watched the stars through the thick glass. Three or four of the other ships from the fleet were shadows darting like techorganic fish between them and the nebula’s expanse.

The speakers buzzed.

“Onslaught,” came over the speakers, muted to a low volume.

He deliberately forced himself to not react.

“Sir. Onslaught, you… you should recharge,” Blast Off tried hesitantly. His electromagnetic field was drawn tight to the surface of the curved walls, presumably in an effort to brush Onslaught’s field as little as he could while having him as a passenger.

Onslaught couldn't decide for sure if Blast Off saw the gesture as a belated, pathetic attempt at respecting his boundaries, but the shuttle was probably internally justifying it to himself as that rather than the amateur manipulation it was in reality. He was surely… He was angling to find a new way to take advantage of the edits. The goddamned edits Onslaught had currently no means of removing.

“We don’t know what we’re flying into,” Blast Off said, “Get some rest while you can.”

His hands balled into fists, cables creaking.

“Blast Off,” Onslaught growled. His field was frigid, voice severe and cold. “If we had a brig, I would be locking you up in it and only letting you out when the team needed transportation. In the interest of me not beating the gears out of you when we touch back down, I would strongly advise you to keep up what you were doing before and _stop talking_ to me right now, because I cannot possibly emphasize how much _I_ _don’t want to hear a word out of your mouth._ ”

Lashing out did the trick, just like Onslaught calculated it would.

Blast Off’s field flared like he’d been struck before he got it back under control and forced it into blankness. The speakers went dead. Onslaught sank back into his seat and offlined his optics again. Without a spacebridge to cut the distance, it was going to be a long, long flight.

**////**

Before, what he’d thought was love had felt good. Now it was a grappling hook speared into his internals, jerking and twitching sickeningly whenever he made a movement, simultaneously tugging him towards Blast Off and dragging him away.

Embarrassing.

Pathetic.

It wasn’t even _real_.

Not that his spark seemed to have received the notification: it lurched in his chest at Blast Off’s misery anyway, ragged and irrational guilt clawing at it like his spark was twisting over somebody who he... Onslaught loathed his spark for that. And he wished he could fully hate Blast Off for causing it.

**////**

Bruticus, once brought under control, was a massive military advantage—the beauty of overwhelming brute force—and while he’d (falsely) believed himself _duly_ grateful to Starscream at the time, Onslaught had harbored no intentions of limiting his long-term goals to something as mundane as working as security detail for him. Nobody stayed on top forever: not Megatron, not the Senate, not the Functionists, and not Starscream, Titan-ordained Chosen One and elected ruler of Cybertron or not. Onslaught intended to be prepared for the turnover when it came.

He wanted access to Starscream’s combiner tech and he had gotten it. His next order of business had been figuring out how to exploit it to its fullest extent.

The Enigma of Combination was powerful but unstudied and unpredictable. Onslaught didn’t want to trust it as a tool more than once. None of the mechs it had been used on were proof that the changes it conveyed were permanent: what if a hundred years down the line, five hundred years, a thousand years, the effects wore off like a coating of sloppily-applied paint, code resetting itself back to its past defaults and combination was no longer within any of his team’s grasp? Onslaught didn’t relish the idea of adjusting and entrusting the parameters of his strategies to take into account he had available as a factor like Bruticus up his subspace only to discover that he couldn’t count it on _sticking_.

He’d run the matter over with Starscream’s pet Autobot scientist—Wheeljack, his name was Wheeljack, the one that had been working on Superion and to be frank, who would have guessed Starscream’s tastes would run towards an Autobot given half the chance—a few times, counched it behind the need for having a professional opinion on maintaining a combiner and wringing maximum efficiency out of it. Pickings were slim on the ground, with Shockwave, his teacher, and Bombshell being extremely dead and when alive, notoriously well-known for their abject insanity. Onslaught wouldn’t have taken his team to them, unless forced at gunpoint. Therefore. Wheeljack.

(And Blast Off put the disturbed gleam in Wheeljack’s optics when Onslaught had gruffly apologized to the scientist for what his (fake) memories told him had been an unfortunate charade that might hinder his ability to use Wheeljack as a resource in a decidedly different light.)

(Had Wheeljack known? Had he suspected?)

He’d been somewhat incensed to discover, according to Wheeljack’s research, he landed his slot in the combiner by a mixture of pure chance and past history, not personal significance.

While utterly unimpressive in comparison to a true loadbearer, his spark had been the one with the most natural loadbearing capacity in the lot of five mechs the Enigma had been presented with to merge into one mech, and since the other four minds accustomed to gravitating to following his orders rather than the other way around, he had served as the core and central hub to support the rest of the body. Swindle came in a close second, Brawl in third, and Blast Off and Vortex were equal in capacity, just slightly less than Brawl.

Combining was taxing on the unprepared frame even if they had the correct programming for it implanted into them, never mind Starscream’s constant, shrill demands had been that they combine on a _regular basis_ , and Onslaught had wanted to reduce the physical strain.

Wear and tear was no joking matter, especially when it was preventable. Practice helped but complete reformats would help more. Modifications to the transformation cogs to better compensate for the new modes they could shift into, some realigning of their mobile internals, adding protective metal coatings to cushion sensitive circuitry under the parts of the components’ frames that served as combination points to slot into when they joined into a whole.

Onslaught had ordered his team into the medbay during the downtime of one of their off-shifts, laid out how matters would unfold, expecting their cooperation with his orders, and they had undergone the procedure to properly retrofit them into combiner units.

At the time, it had made perfect, logical sense.

Things were going well for the first time since the war ended. None of his subordinates were being disobedient glitches. The background racket of their constant in-fighting and bickering wasn’t escalating past the normal levels that could be fixed by him stepping in to knock them back into line. They had proven compatible enough for a successful gestalt, so why _not_ strengthen an existing connection that would bind them tighter to him and grease the gears of the effort Onslaught had to exert to regulate them?

The Combaticons were his responsibility. The team belonged to him. His to discipline, his to command, his to deploy. He had every right to keep them close.

The mess with combination had started with Swindle wandering off on his own without backup and getting into trouble anyway, being too blasted independent for Onslaught’s tastes.

It too, had galled him. He didn’t claim he liked Swindle but the jeep was useful and it was irritating he couldn’t keep Swindle like he could the other three. Swindle proved too slippery for that, the part of the team so loosely attached it rattled but never completely detached. It would be simpler to grapple with a wet bar of soap than hold onto the little slagger. (It had been easy to order Swindle’s chest plates and upper back plating to be reinforced and made extra dense under the guise of improving Bruticus’ balance by making him closer to Brawl’s mass. It had been even easier to appeal to Swindle’s greed with the promise of free upgrades so he would accept it. Avarice was soaked straight into the con-mech’s core. Swindle couldn’t pass up on a bargain sale.)

It had all made perfect, perfect sense—right up until Blast Off had, looking anywhere but at Onslaught’s face, confessed to treachery and then his fist smashed into Blast Off’s face and all his perfect logic crashed, knocked down to the cell floor—just like his (false) lover—to break.

The shuttle had gone down and stayed down. Blast Off’s bleeding mouth left bright dots of energon on the floor when he had crawled away on his hands and knees from the collective fury lashing out at him from their electromagnetic fields and huddled in the corner furthest away from them, arms wrapped around himself, helm bowed.

They’d broken out of prison, Onslaught saw to that.

They killed Airachnid on their way out. He had made careful note of which cell she had been confined to when they were transferred between one jail to another, and in this small jail, she had been imprisoned in a high-security level two levels above the Combaticons and three cells away from the end of the corridor. Eleven dead guards, Vortex’s talent for misusing a pocketed laser lancet, and a hack job to jam the communication lines to the outside with interference later, the Combaticons had stormed it. She fought like every wild thing did once it was cornered in a small space. But it had been five on one, and unlike her, they had lived through four million years of open warfare.

And they had stolen the guards’ guns.

Onslaught had ripped her jaw from her face, and tore off her hands, uncaring that the police had already removed her integrated needles upon arrest, tossing them still sparking to Brawl to gleefully smash underfoot, then told Vortex he had a cycle to make her deactivation the most painful one he could manage in that time before they moved onto the next phrase of their escape. Time was of essence.

Vortex’ face had lit up in a way only a talented and unrepentant enthusiast being granted permission to practice his craft in front of a captivated audience could. Onslaught enjoyed that look. He enjoyed the brutality with which Vortex extracted results and the unhinged glee he took in his work. Vortex’s delight washed into the bond, bright as a burning fuse.

In the end, Airachnid claimed an honor a select few of Vortex’s victims could: she didn’t scream and she didn’t beg when one of Vortex’s pink-streaked blades came whistling down to part her neck from her shoulders in a spurt of energon. Brawl cheered. Standing watch at the door, Swindle laughed and Blast Off’s field emitted faint approval. Nobody had mercy to spare for the one who had stuck her needles in their helms. Onslaught had needed her helm intact to extract her memory chip from. He stuffed it into a subspace pocket. And then they put the jail behind them.

But there hadn’t been an escape.

Onslaught had just traded in one prison cell for another prison.

Bruticus grumbled, roiling deep below the surface of his mind. They were trapped in each other, and there was no exit from a permanently merged gestalt. There was no key codes to be stolen, no bribes that could be paid.

Linked intimately to his spark, four other sparks pulsed. Amidst the ranks, one in particular shivered on the periphery of his awareness. The blocks the Combaticons kept strong on their respective ends of the bond didn’t change the facts. Despite clamping down on his end, Onslaught couldn’t turn off the feed of dry statistics on his teammates’ status running on his HUD that it was narrowed down to, the gestalt bond feeding information to Bruticus’ hub, even if he didn’t want to know that his (false) lover wa—that his—his second-in-com—that _Blast Off_ was under-fuelled, overly stressed, and inadequately recharging or that he was still nursing a cracked visor and a damaged optic from the blow he’d taken in the prison from Onslaught’s fist or the dent in his stomach plating where he had been kicked ached.

**////**

Business was normal on Earth, by which Onslaught meant from his point of view it was chaos and he couldn’t wait to wash his hands of it. It was a confusing slagheap of one inexplicable event piled on top of another set of inexplicable events that refused to stop happening regardless of what anybody involved had to say in complaint about it. That was Earth’s default state, take it or leave it so far as a Cybertronian understood it.

Turned out Brawl’s prediction had the right of it.

Like the rest of the stragglers of the fleet Blast Off had tagged along with, they arrived too late to do anything. They missed the entire fisco.

Unicron was destroyed. Optimus Prime was dead, again, for real this time. Soundwave was dead, and Starscream was dead, and Shockwave was being marched off to his sentencing. And a _black hole_ hovered in the skies over Earth where Unicron used to be that nobody seemed too troubled by for one Primus-forsaken reason or another, and two of the Seekers were consorting with one of the four-legged organics that followed around the taller organic inhabitants infesting the planet. Refugees from Cybertron and all of Cybertron’s colonies were crawling over the place, mechs and Junkions and Sharkicons and organic aliens walking amidst the humans, and the humans’ news cycles and the humans’ governments were collectively losing their heads over it.

The Titans crouched next to human monuments that weren’t budging, because they were carrying active hot spots somehow and that meant a new generation of Cybertronians was stepping out of the silver ooze, walking around and tripping over their own wheels and flapping their wings and gawking openly at everything and everybody.

Brawl said they reminded him of MTOs, like the Genericons, just dumber because they were getting babied and less likely to end up slagged ‘cuz they weren’t getting kicked face first into a battle before they worked out which way to hold a gun right. Swindle looked at him funny for that comment and the morose way he’d said it. Onslaught had been privately disconcerted by how Brawl said it too but he chose not to show it. It had been a long time since he’d seen a new face on any Cybertronian; High Command on both sides tended to recycle the facial molds they used for the MTO batches to save on resources.

They held a funeral for Optimus Prime. The Combaticons didn’t attend. (Well, Swindle attended but that was so he could peddle sales of memorial goods that Onslaught dismissed as not warranting the processor power to calculate how much sweet-talking Swindle must have done to get his hands on when Swindle’s bank accounts on Cybertron were space dust.)

Cybertron was gone. It was a field of debris in the void of space. There was no way to fix _that_.

But Rodimus Prime sent in a message revealing he had produced a _replacement_ Cybertron from an alternate dimension out of nowhere. More shrieking and political slagfests commenced.

“Not out of _nowhere_ , out of _quantum physics_ ,” insisted a purple submarine from the _Lost Light_. And out of the results of one of the Autobot scientists’ messing around, apparently. The scientist in question posted a very long-winded explanation of how that worked on the Big Conversation, with mentions of yellow briefcases and fighting a giant fake Primus and geobombs and a hollow planet and that loose cannon Scorpnok, ending with a demand that everybody who read it comment on what an incredible genius he was.

Vortex and Brawl spent quality time picking fights in the comments instead. At least it kept the two idiots busy.

Threatening a few of the colony civilians into forking over a spare computer console let him scan the memory chip he had pried out of the spider’s helm as he dismantled it. Ten minutes into the scan, a contingency virus corrupted the data on the memory chip beyond recovery and then wiped the computer. Fried it. The spider had booby-trapped it. A dead end. Onslaught couldn’t muster up surprise. He did, however, get the satisfaction of putting his fist through the screen and then pitching the whole affair still-smoking out the nearest window.

Starscream was dead. Onslaught cycled back to that.

An offlined Starscream beyond the revenge of anybody, save Primus. Onslaught wanted payback for the indignity he had been given at Starscream’s hands. But he’d missed his window of opportunity. Permanently. The world didn’t trouble itself one bit about Onslaught’s grudges. In light of that, it was difficult to focus on what logic dictated he needed to be focusing on—the new political status quo, the ramifications of Cybertron’s destruction and replacement, the means to get his team back onto a steady footing—when white-hot rage pulsed underneath every thought. The ability to make decisions with cold detachment rather than allow his emotions to influence his judgement was out of his reach. That wasn’t a good sign.

They had two options: remain on Earth where most of the team at least understood the terrain from prior experience or take their chances on the replacement and therefore unknown Cybertron.

Overclocked processor throbbing, Onslaught reluctantly quit the subroutines he’d ran for fuming.

Nobody asked Blast Off to join in the discussion on whether or not to stay on Earth, and standing off to the side like a drone left in stand-by, shoulders hunched and mask locked in place, Blast Off didn’t volunteer an opinion. His opinion meant nothing. It was less than worthless. At the moment he was in disgrace: he had been booted from second-in-command to the lowest rung on the team’s pecking order, below even where Vortex was relegated to when he disobeyed orders and ruined Onslaught’s plans, lower than Swindle when he failed to curtail his greed on missions. If they voted to go to the replacement Cybertron, he would shuttle them there without payment or a whisper of complaint. If they voted to remain on Earth or head for Soundwave’s old commune, he would remain without resistance. His withdrawal from the group had been self-imposed at the start but was now reinforced by his teammates making no signals they would accept his return to the fold.

Onslaught knew his fury at Blast Off was infecting the rest of the gestalt’s mood, leaking past the heavy blocks and making the atmosphere tense and bitter. Emotions were the hardest to seal away from the bond. He couldn’t bring himself to care. On the tailend of that thought, his spark performed that disquieting lurching motion in his chest again.

He viciously choked it off; his processor was feeding him a lie. A distraction. He wasn’t _actually_ in love with Blast Off. A part of him just believed he was to the point where it ached. That part of him wasn’t going to be in control. It was shadowplay and Onslaught wouldn’t allow himself to be tricked into buying it twice now that he was aware it was there. He had no reason to feel like his spark chamber was constricting tight and sharp over shunning a traitor. Blast Off had brought his cracked visor and dented helm on himself.

Onslaught rubbed at the plating on the back of his neck and concentrated on the present. Later. Once he had the edits deleted and he could remember what had truly happened before his memories had been overwritten. He couldn’t rely on Blast Off’s _word_ for what had happened. Later.

 _Then_ he would form his judgements and deal with Blast Off.

Later. Not now.

He… He couldn’t deal with this now.

(Not when the giddy memory-file of kissing Blast Off and feeling like it was one of the single most enticing things in the world on their last date lingered, still fresh as a newly unsealed vat of energon. A moment spoiled by the knowledge Blast Off had smiled to his face while selling him out to an enemy.)

**////**

Blurr had been— _was_ —a long-standing affair of Swindle's the team had known of and accordingly tolerated. It was due to Blurr's generosity to the rest of his lover‘s gestalt that they have a roof over their helms and the means to earn shanix on New Cybertron. Onslaught wasn’t _thrilled_ about being in debt to a former Autobot, (though marginally more tolerable than being in debt to a neutral) but he wasn’t thrilled about much of anything anyway so he gritted his denta and put up with it. It was better than being broke. He had worked security arrangements before. This wasn’t new ground, no matter how demeaning he found it.

Despite the many things that confounded well over half of the current on-planet population about the replacement Cybertron, the least confounding thing was that Maccadam’s Oil House was—more or less, better or worst—the same as the one on their original Cybertron, the one that had gotten eaten by Unicron. The Functionists had done their work on it. It was stripped down of what flipprantries they could deem unsuitable for the public sphere, tattered, beaten. But it survived four million years of civil war in one timeline and so it had weathered the Functionist regime in the alternate timeline it hailed from—in more or less—one shape. It stood where it had always stood. It had gotten shut down sixty-three times and each of its successive twenty-one owners had been killed, only to be replaced: this would be its sixty-fourth re-opening, Blurr having taken over as the most recent owner. And Blurr had rallied a rebuilding crew to him. Swindle took care of the marketing campaign. Customers flocked to the doors.

With the Council so much melted slag and unable to utter a peep of protest, the re-opening was grand.

Grand and full of Cybertronians getting themselves messily drunk in public.

Brawl had wanted to join in, but Onslaught had vetoed that on the grounds it was a bad look for the new bouncers of the planet’s most popular bar to get drunk on the job. Brawl was vocal about his disappointment, but he obeyed. Vortex called him a spoilsport. Onslaught told him if he wanted him to put Vortex in his place as a reminder of who was in charge of the team, Vortex only needed to say so. Vortex shut up.

Mechanisms with the faces of dead mechs mingled in the crowd.

Astrotrain with a topcoat of different paint flaking off his shoulders lounged at a table, swapping stories and rust sticks with Cosmos and a laughing mech who was a dead-ringer for Dreadwing. A grounder that had the look of a down-on-his-luck Countdown had commandeered the end of the bar counter for an arm-wrestling contest with Runabout, Runamuck and the rest of the easily-amused rabble knocking shoulders and cheering them on. The blue noble who had been an Autobot in one timeline, stood in a corner and watched the masses and sipped a cube of malted aluminum with somebody who couldn’t be anybody but Blitzwing’s alternate. And Onslaught swore he had caught a glimpse of the long-deactivated Technobots, five or six of them, traipsing out the bar’s doorway arm-in-arm, smashed and singing a badly off-key Cybertronian marching song in unison. It was eerie. Like seeing ghosts.

Onslaught was then preoccupied by stopping a drunk Override from hurdling a bar stool through a window. The revelries carried on for three days, and well into the third night. Colonists, neutrals, and alternates and civilians and soldiers and Autobots and Decepticons flowed in and out the doors. When it came to the first days at a job, Onslaught’d had worse.

**////**

The shared quarters of their apartment downtown was much less impressive than their previous government residence, but put to shame the grimmy, rundown hovel of an apartment they had been crammed into in the Deception side of town before. They each had a room to themselves and a functioning energon dispenser that happened to work more than three days of the week, for starters. Their old finicky one had only worked on a handful of days if the temperature and outside radiation levels were just-so right.

Blast Off and Onslaught picked rooms on the opposite sides of the apartment from each other, Onslaught taking over the room Vortex had been eying due to its view of the city despite the helicopter’s squawk of outrage. The room Blast Off took was the smallest in their quarters. Nobody fought Blast Off over it. Swindle treated the room he grabbed as was his wont: a spare storage unit. It filled up fast with wares. Swindle preferred to hog berthspace in Blurr’s apartment at night.

The apartment was also clean, courtesy of Blast Off. Blast Off took care of the menial chores: he cleared paint flakes off the furniture where armor scratched against it. He changed out the lights after two of them blew one night. He took the used cubes from Brawl’s engex nights and washed them. He sorted them according to size and piled them neatly into their cabinets.

The fight had petered out of him.

Strange. Onslaught hadn’t noticed that Blast Off was prone to arguing with the details of his orders until the arguments stopped.

Blast Off worked his shift as security at Maccadam’s, came back, did his chores before Vortex or Brawl could, and then vanished into his berthroom, only re-appearing to mechanically refuel or grab a datapad to take back to his room. The job rotation’s arrangement set it up so Blast Off and Onslaught never worked the same shift.

Onslaught told himself he was glad for his obvious avoidance, since it gave him time to think, and doubly, bitterly glad Blast Off had made no attempt to re-new the old sham between them. He’d hit him again if he dared to.

But another thing Onslaught was unpleasantly coming to realize was the sheer _scale_ of how much he became accustomed to delegating to Blast Off over the millennia. Blast Off had taken care of aerial support in combat, but he had also been the one to bring in employment contracts, to check in with Swindle, to hand in the rent, to report to Onslaught on openings to take advantage of, to fuss over the team budget. He had been trusted unreservedly. In Bruticus, Blast Off had been the part of the circuitry to cushion the rest with his neutrality, lining up their jostling edges, the sharp points, pressing upon the imperative to get along, work together, cooperate with each other.

Now Blast Off just did whatever the nearest Combaticon told him to do.

It took Onslaught cutting him off to register how far he had inserted himself.

It infuriated him. He wanted ( _want_ , he had to phrase it as want, it was an engineered _want_ , not love, a fake love; the insistence on different terminology sounded feeble even internally but he dug solidly onto it) Blast Off. He wanted Blast Off and he resented Blast Off for what he had done. He wanted to lash out at Blast Off and he wanted to protect him. Blast Off was unshakably loyal, a wonderful asset; Blast Off was a liability. Blast Off had never needed watching: Blast Off had to be monitored. His processor insisted both opposed sets of facts were true, despite the paradox that the reality of one set cancelled out the other. Blast Off couldn't be both loyal and traitorous, both desirable and weak, both beloved and disdained. His mind railed against it, thrashing for a compromise between the two it simply couldn’t reach.

Onslaught blamed the edits.

He tried to not think about the lack it implied about his willpower if he had so swiftly fallen for what they told him he felt instead of fighting the shadowplay off. Why hadn’t he questioned it when he had looked at Blast Off in a new light? Why had he been a fool? Why hadn’t Blast Off _told_ him the moment they were alone they were being used?

Deleting the edits had to be done soon.

**////**

It was harder than any of them expected to be seperate. The longer they went without a merge, ever since the wardens had caught the Combaticons kicking up a prison riot as cover to try and bring Bruticus down on their helms, wised up, and started putting them in separate cells after the second jail transfer, the worse the itch burning under their armor and down into their protoform got. The backlash from being used to routinely combining under orders. They ignored it: that didn’t make ignoring it pleasant.

After arriving on New Cybertron, they had tried to check to see if they could sate the itch and form Bruticus at all. Brawl counted that attempt as the second-worst experience he had ever had combining.

They had joined, Bruticus had triumphantly roared awake, his smaller units finally slotted back together and in place—then clutched at his helm in pain and sheared apart, as his core unit uncontrollably recoiled in violent rejection of his right arm, splitting them to Bruticus’ confusion at the disassembly, tossing his components to slam into the ground.

Catching himself before he hit the dirt and transforming midair, Blast Off’s engines screamed as he tore away into the sky, taking the flood of _despair-sorrysorrysorry-self-hatred-agony_ away with him. Groggily, Brawl lifted his helm off the ground and watched Onslaught peel off in alt mode in the opposite direction, the truck’s tires squealing and kicking up a cloud of dirt as he sped towards the city. Blast Off was a dot dwindling away in the clouds.

“That fragging _sucked_ ,” summed up Vortex from where he sprawled. Dizzy from the destabilization, Swindle’s back heaved like he was trying to purge his tanks but no fuel was coming up his intake.

Brawl groaned and dropped his face into the ground again. “Scrap.”

“Ons! Hey, ONS!” Vortex sat up to shout after Onslaught. “Come on, he isn’t waiting for us? And combining today was his idea anyway! Slag-sucking hard-aft FUCKER.”

“Ughhhhh,” was Swindle’s contribution.

Brawl dimly tried to remember how an individual moved his fingers, then his arms, then his legs, one by one convincing frizzled circuits to respond. He was a frame, not just a leg under the commands of a greater whole. Emptiness was a physical throb, hollowing him out on the inside where the connections to entwine him with the others had been active. The combiner programming he harbored reached out, protocols unfulfilled by the short and botched merge. It sucked to wait out the seperation pains.

“That went bad,” Brawl said into the dirt.

“Brilliant observation, genius,” quipped Vortex.

“Shaddup.”

“Why did we think this would work?” Swindle groused, levering himself up on his dirt-caked elbows. “So long as Blast Off and Onslaught can’t stand going near each other, Bruticus’ not going to stick together. It’s impossible.”

“ _You_ know that, and _I_ know that, but try telling _Onslaught_ that. He doesn’t want to admit weaknesses like not being able to control his emotions. He’s above it all. Too proud. It’s like nobody else’s ever gone through a bad break up before he did.” Vortex twisted and felt down his back, shivering in pleasure as his claws prodded into the spots where they’d hit the ground and bent.

Swindle got up. “That moron. Both of them. I’m going to be feeling this for the rest of the day...”

Transforming after Vortex unbent his rotors so he could fly overhead, they drove back to the apartment. Brawl lagged behind in the left lane once they hit the pavement, turning over in his processor not just the roiling turmoil of Onslaught’s howling _rage-disappointment barely-restrained-violence_ but the jolt of _self-hatred-guiltguiltguilt_ from Blast Off he’d caught before Blast Off’s hardline to the rest of the combination broke.

**////**

Once the deep blue of night began spilling across the sky like an oil slick hours later Blast Off crept back. Sprawled on the couch, feet kicked up and remote clicking through the television channels, Brawl paused the holovid on the screen. “You’re coming inside now, huh.”

Blast Off stood there, upset and dishevelled and coated in dust. His visor had bleached from a deep purple to a sickly lavender.

“Correct.”

“You’ve been standing outside for the last three hours since you got back. What’s with that? The door wasn’t locked or nothin’.”

Blast Off glanced up at the ceiling where their berthrooms were and where the closed bond informed him, as it had informed Brawl of his location for the last three hours, of the status of the three teammates upstairs, then back at Brawl. His visor shifted in a way that gave away behind his mask, he was chewing on his lower lip. “I… I thought it would better if I waited until Onslaught was recharging before I came inside.”

 _Onslaught didn’t want to see me_ went unspoken.

He said nothing else. Brawl glared him down for a long moment. He wasn’t the sharpest tool in the repair box when it came to anything that didn’t involve setting up explosives or maiming, but he missed the wild rush that came with being Bruticus and he hated the itch under his plates and he wasn’t happy how the boss and Blast Off were crippling any hopes of Bruticus getting time outside so he could smash some stuff real good and soothe the itch. And he wasn’t happy about Blast Off’s role in letting Starscream mess with their minds and screw them over. Onslaught had been a wreck since the truth came out, even if the boss seemed to be laboring under the impression he was hiding it okay.

But from the bottom of his core Blast Off felt like a rusted cog that he had lied. He knew he’d fragged up. He wasn’t faking that. And fine, feeling bad like that didn’t fix slag.

But… From Brawl’s view of things, it was somewhere to start.

Besides, nothing was gonna _get_ fixed if Blast Off and Onslaught continued acting like Onslaught hitting Blast Off in the face and then both of them walling up their ends of the bond and avoiding each other was somehow the magic solution.

He jerked his helm at another doorway. “The washrack’s open, if you want it. Tex and Swin already had their turns.”

Blast Off rebooted his optics. Then he scrubbed a hand at his face. “... Thank you.”

“Whatever,” Brawl grunted.

He trudged past the couch. Brawl didn’t look at him after that. Through the walls, he listened to the distant sounds of Blast Off moving around in the washracks. Wet metal squeaking. The sudden hiss of solvent gushing down, steam billowing out. Brawl turned up the opening theme of the holovid playing from the screen to drown it out.

**////**

A cube slid across the table to a stop in front of him, the bright fluid sloshing inside, prompting Onslaught to turn his helm towards the interloper, determinedly shunting aside the thread of detailed information about the real-time status, fuel levels, and proximity of said interloper the gestalt bond fed him in an instant. Brawl crashed into the seat next to him, a second already-half-empty cube in his hand. The fumes raising from his cube spoke of engex.

Onslaught frowned behind his mask at him. “What is it?”

“Nothin’, boss,” Brawl dismissed. “Just thought you looked like you could use a drink, that’s all.” As Onslaught’s frown intensified, the tank sensed he was in the danger zone and hastened to add. “Vortex’s watchin’ the perimeter, I’m not slacking off.”

“I’ve warned you about drinking on the job,” Onslaught said, but he put the datapad he was typing on down and took the cube. He sniffed. High quality coolant, not engex.

“I heard you, I heard you.”

Brawl polished off his half-empty cube and started on a second one by the time Onslaught’s drained cube clinked down onto the table, next to the datapad. Little blue droplets pearled on its rim.

“Alright. Out with it. You have something to say. I can tell,” Onslaught said.

Seat creaking under his massive bulk, Brawl looked at him sideways. “You’re not going to punch me if I say it?”

“Don’t make me repeat myself.”

That wasn’t a promise not to punch him. Brawl drummed his fingers repetitively on the table. Sloppy emotional slag had never been his forte and it didn’t start being the tank’s strength now. Much less when it involved bruised feelings. He and Onslaught were tough, battle-hardened soldiers, best of the best, not like those wimps who insisted on _talking_ about their sparkfelt _feelings_ to everybody in audial range or the fresh metal in the rank-and-file who panicked before combat. But even tough mechs might wanna try putting off their problems and Onslaught seemed to be bent on doing just that, not that Blast Off was much better. (Blast Off was probably worse.) So he picked the blunt opening and blurted out, “When are you and Blast Off gonna make up?”

Onslaught went from calm to launching a glare full of knives at the other mech at his table in five seconds flat.

“ _Excuse_ me?”

“‘S’not a secret you two have avoided each other like the rust plague since the whole… Y’know,” Brawl tapped the side of his helm. “Starscream having the spider lady needle us so we thought we worked for him instead of wanting him dead thing.” Brawl ground the shifting mechanisms whirring inside his chassis in undisguised frustration. Mask rolled back into his helm so he could refuel, his nose wrinkled. “Boss, you can’t avoid one of the crew forever.”

“I’m not avoiding him, he’s avoiding me,” Onslaught lied.

“Uh-huh,” Brawl said, not buying it but not stupid enough to contradict Onslaught aloud.

“Anyway. It’s not your business whether we,” and Onslaught’s electromagnetic field flickered, going strange and indecipherable for a moment, and the jittering fluctuation got a squint out of Brawl before it returned to being smooth as steel, “‘Make up’ or not. He’s on probation. I don’t require or want his company. He can stay away. I don’t care if he does. Why should I?”

“But—”

Brawl switched his cube from one large hand to another. His brow furrowed.

“You don’t care? But… I thought you two had a good thing going, even if how it got started was sketchy,” Brawl fidgeted. “Even if you aren’t going to get back together, shouldn’t you like, at least talk to each other? Work things out?”

“We had ‘a good thing going,’” Onslaught repeated flatly. The quotation marks were audible. “It’s irrelevant whether or not it was ‘good.’ It happened because of a lie.”

Brawl refused to stop pushing the topic. If it had been lies before, they didn’t have a reason to not be honest _now_. They were in the present, not the past. Brawl didn’t overthink much about the past. Or anything really. He had Onslaught to do the complicated overthinking and scheming out the consequences to his actions for him: Brawl kept it simple, brutally so. That was his role in the team. “But that doesn’t mean you guys shouldn’t talk about your scrap.”

His voice came out tight, much tighter than Onslaught cared to admit. “I’ve said everything I want to say to him.”

How low had he sunk that _Brawl_ was attempting to console him?

“Sure, if ya’ say so,” Brawl huffed.

Onslaught wasn’t amused. “Are you mouthing off to me, Brawl?”

“Just saying, I got your back but I think you two have way too much stuff going on between you for you to have said your full piece to Blast Off already. You don’t act like anything’s resolved.”

“In case it slipped your slow processor,” Onslaught’s jaw clenched. “I stated I have _already_ said what I want to the mech who turned our relations into a sham, who let us get _shadowplayed_ so he could have that _sham_.”

Brawl said gruffly, “I _know_ that, boss. He went about it in a really dumb way, but it sounds like he wanted you to be happy and Starscream talked him into thinking that was how he could do it, by pretending. He fragged everything up, but he meant well. Shouldn’t that count for something? Him wanting you to be happy?” Brawl shrugged, the threads of the black treads on his broad shoulders moving with the motion. “Earn him you at least hearing him out?”

**////**

In his dreams, Onslaught was immobilized on a hard surface, his connection to his body’s mechanisms severed, and long, spindly fingers were scratching across his face, oiled joints barely making a noise as they moved. _Snick snick snick_. He stared blindly into the darkness of his offlined visor. He had lost track of time. There wasn’t a means for him to gauge how long it had been happening so he had no way to start plotting reliatation. (His comm systems weren’t responding.) _Snick snick_. Tracing lines over his helm, squirming needle-thin tips into the seam lines of his mask, stroking his audials and the line of his jaw.

Then they paused on his visor, unwanted pinpoints of sensation skirting along the edges of the shape. This wasn’t something he could fight. (His cannons were disabled.) _Snick snick snick snick._ (His comm systems weren’t responding, his back-mounted cannons were disabled, his visor wouldn’t online no matter how many requests he sent to it, he couldn’t move, his limbs were heavy and dead weight, he had no back-up, his vocalizer was offline, he was blind, he was helpless to stop the fingers from touching his helm, from finding his seam lines, he hated whomever had rendered him this helpless, hated them beyond all fragging words, and clinging to his habitual rage was proof he wasn’t afraid, he couldn’t move, _he couldn’t move_.) Then. Then. Fingers puncturing into the lenses, heedless of the agony, needle-fine points plunging nice and deep into his shattered optics as he roared a silent protest into the non-responsive comms, worming inside, into his optics, into his _processor_ —

Then he woke up.

A bad recharge system flux.

Onslaught had been meaning to go find the shooting range he had overheard one of the customers at the bar talking about. Now was as good a time as any for a round of target practice.

**////**

“Well, _I_ say you kill Blast Off. If I was in your position, it’s what I would do.”

“Vortex. I told you, I want feedback on an intra-team problem, not a offer to carry out a one-mech hit list.”

Perched on the metal lip of the park fountain, Vortex shrugged insolently. "You got my feedback. Slap an inhibitor band on his back, take Blasters up into the sky, and let him drop. Problem solved, you get payback, Blasters gets his due, we move on with our lives!"

“No.” Onslaught snapped. “Anyway, we don’t have an inhibitor band.”

“Swindle could rustle one up.”

“I said, no. We’re _not_ killing Blast Off.” Onslaught said forcefully.

Vortex twirled the stylus he was playing with between his claws. He pointed the end at Onslaught. “Is that really what you think we shouldn’t do, boss? Or is it what the mnemosurgery’s telling you do? You’re compromised.”

Behind his mask Onslaught ground his denta, angry he couldn’t deny Vortex’s retort. He _was_ compromised. His decisions about Blast Off _were_ suspect. He would be a fool to pretend otherwise. He was working on finding somebody to remove the edits from him and the overwrites on the team’s memories, but they remained active. “Regardless, the fact remains Blast Off is a component of Bruticus. Do you _want_ to experience what it feels like to have a gestalt-mate die, much less how it would feel to kill him ourselves?” Even Vortex couldn’t be that fond of pain or that capable of resisting the combiner programming.

That remark made Vortex shift slightly, crimson gaze cutting to the side in a flash of uncertainty. No, Onslaught took grim satisfaction he wasn’t the only one trapped by the spark-level programming. He said, “We can find a replacement.”

Onslaught shook his helm. “Too risky. Soundwave destroyed the Enigma and most of the scientists who specialized in combiner tech are dead. We don’t know if that would work.” And it would be cutting off a limb and strapping on a cheap prosthetic to cover the wound—even if Blast Off had betrayed him, they had served on the same team for millions of years. It would take thousands of years to train up a replacement for Blast Off that would remotely hope to measure up to Onslaught’s standards.

And Bruticus wouldn’t understand explanations about lies and punishments. His processors were too new and ran too slow. He had the self-restraint of a newspark. All the combiner would grasp if Blast Off died was the loss of a vital part. Onslaught had no desire to be forced to tolerate Bruticus’ mourning stacked on top of his own feelings.

“I still think you should get rid of him.”

Onslaught modulated his response to be purposefully neutral unlike his feelings. “He _has_ expressed... remorse over his role in the mnemosurgery. Brawl doesn’t seem inclined to carry a grudge in the long term.” And Swindle wasn’t forthcoming about his current opinion on the matter.

“Oh, he’s sorry. Sorry’s just a word, Ons,” Vortex said scornfully. “It doesn’t matter how much Blast Off says he’s _sorry_. People will say _anything_ they think will save their armor in a pinch, if you get them desperate. And he’s desperate. That doesn’t change what happened. He manipulated you and he let Starscream control us. Ol’ Screamer made fools out of us.”

He hissed. “Forget words. Look at actions. You know what Blast Off’s actions say? He wanted to frag you, and to scrap with the rest of us. To scrap with the _team_.”

Onslaught looked away. “His actions…”

His fingers twitched towards the nape of his neck before he stopped and forced himself to lower his hand back down to his side.

“He had a motive for them. He’s smitten with me. And he’s been for years. From the start of the war. Maybe before that.” Unease and alarmed frustration stole into the surface of his words despite his best efforts. He prided himself on being able to read situations, on his mind’s ability to seize the information at hand and perfectly funnel it into building strategies and counter-measures. How had a weak point like Blast Off’s feelings flown under his nose for so long? “It seems so obvious now.” But only now.

Vortex snorted and tipped back on his heels. “Please. He didn’t have a thing for you when the war started.”

“You say that with a lot of confidence,” Onslaught grunted. “Since when were _you_ paying attention to his love life back then?”

His mask removed, the stylus Vortex was chewing on wagged up and down as he talked. “‘Cuz my job was Intel, Ons. I kept an eye on my people,” His wicked smirk showed fangs. “Him included. Remember Magmara 9?”

Onslaught inclined his helm. That had been a successful campaign, with the Autobots routed and the planet destabilized by covertly setting off a four-way war between the local species, conquered, and stripped of all resources it possessed for fueling the Decepticon war machine, the two surviving species of organics who hadn’t killed themselves off processed into either crude biofuel to power energon refineries or into forced labor groups off-planet. The efficiency had been commendable. He looked back on it fondly. “Perfectly.”

“Good times,” Vortex hummed, popping the stylus out of his mouth. “We were sent in for Phrase Four. The entire team. Towards the end of the campaign, that’s around when he started dropping the first solid hints I noticed.”

The truck did the math. He said, “Seven thousand years into the war?”

“Yup!” Vortex chirped.

Onslaught sounded vaguely strangled. “... And you didn’t see fit to _mention_ this minor fact to me during any of _the following millennia?_ ”

“If you were too damn hopelessly oblivious and wrapped up in your strategies to pick up on it and Blast Off didn’t have the spinal struts to buck up and tell you himself, that was none of my business,” was Vortex’ callous answer. The helicopter’s electromagnetic field flared up in a small, angry spurt, tingling and twitching against the borders of Onslaught’s field. “And until this fisco, it wasn’t my _problem_. It was Blast Off’s problem.”

Onslaught was nearly overcome by the powerful urge to slam his face into his hands. Or a wall. “Was the fact that one of my subordinates had a crush on me an open secret?”

Vortex tipped his helm to the side.

“No. He tried to hide it. I figured it out, Swindle clued in on it around the one and half million years into the war mark. But Brawl wasn’t in on it, just thought Blast Off was being a devoted soldier until I told him after the war ended. As for the other Decepticons… Fragged if I know.”

Onslaught was curt. “Elaborate on that.”

“Blast Off wasn’t what I would call subtle about chasing after your aft. It was like… Watching a tame turbofox beg for a head pat sometimes. I’m just throwing that out there.” It wouldn’t have been _as_ easy for outsiders to see it and Blast Off would have taken pains to conceal his vulnerabilities from other Decepticons, but it wasn’t impossible.

“I—hm,” Onslaught bit out.

“Probably why none of us questioned it when you suddenly decided Blast Off was on the market after all, and asked him out,” Vortex mused.

Onslaught didn’t care for the reminder of how easily they had missed the holes in the story Starscream rewrote for them. “Many mistakes are clear only in hindsight.”

Vortex said, “Bet that’s what you tell yourself when you wonder why you don’t pick up on it.”

Onslaught’s engine revved heavily in warning. “ _Don’t_ test my patience today.”

“Okay!” Vortex held up his hands. “My offer still stands, you know. I can solve the problem for you.”

“And for now, my answer is still no,” Onslaught shut him down. “You’re awfully eager to acquaint yourself with Blast Off’s internals.”

Vortex pouted in mock offense, rotors rustling. “Maybe I’m jealous. You didn’t go try and woo _me_ with dinners and concert visits before you bent me over your desk and screwed me.”

From Vortex, that was no answer at all. And his end of the bond was closed, allowing Onslaught to sense the thrumming of his spark, but no thoughts or emotions emanating through unless Vortex chose to share. So Vortex didn’t feel like telling him. Amused, Onslaught rumbled, “Don’t pretend you’re a romantic at spark. You wanted a frag, not a date.” And Vortex had been charged and slick to the touch, covered in other mechs’ energon the first time they’d done it before the war, which was something restaurants typically didn’t appreciate getting smeared on furniture.

And Onslaught had never considered himself in love with Vortex.

**////**

There’s no hand scratching at his face in this dream, just a familiar set of arms resting on his shoulders, a body leaning up against his sitting body from behind, the bond purring they posed no more threat to him than his own foot or his own hand. (In root mode Blast Off was a full helm smaller than him: Onslaught had to be sitting down if he wanted to position them like that.)

Blast Off rested his forehelm on the back of his helm, promising _this one last time, I’m with you, just us. Just us, you, me, Brawl, Vortex, Swindle. We’ll never need anybody else, ever again_ , Onslaught’s words pouring out of Blast Off’s mouth. A script from a different memory, just as unreliable. It was fake. A fantasy. But it was a pleasant one and better than the nightmare of needles sunken knuckle-deep in his optics so rather than fight it he stayed in the fantasy and let Blast Off talk nonsense to him. _I’m with you_ , Blast Off said over and over. He seemed to think he meant it. It hardly mattered what he thought. It wasn’t real. None of what they had shared was real. He didn’t mean it.

Onslaught was disappointed in him, the emotion like a lump of unprocessed waste oil crammed in his fuel pump, for not meaning it.

 _Nobody else. It should be just us_ , Blast Off said in Onslaught’s words, as if he had no words of his own left to share.

And maybe that was a nightmare in its own right too.

The next morning, Onslaught took his energon back to the workstation in his room, and buried himself in tracking down a mnemosurgeon that could be trusted and whose treatment fees could be afforded. It sat next to the keyboard until by the time he picked it up to refuel, the energon inside had thickened and formed a film on the surface.

A ‘mnemosurgeon that could be trusted?’ Hah. Talk about a contradiction in terms. But he required a mnemosurgeon and so one must be found.

**////**

It's unreasonable to want to beat Blurr’s face in when he spots him and Swindle in the bar together, sharing a bottle of engex or with datapads spread out before them, Swindle harassing him about balancing his budget. It's unreasonable to be sourly jealous that Swindle doesn’t have a cause to doubt what he bought from Blurr was real—it had started before the incident with Bruticus, and despite the shouting that erupted between him and Blurr upon Swindle's stunt of coming back from getting shot through the back by (a hostile Camien in the chaos, no it had been—) Starscream, it had survived it.

Getting accidentally blasted in the midsection by Brawl during a spar would be preferable to the personal humiliation of asking Swindle for advice.

So he disengaged his FIM chip and drank.

“What are you doing?” piped up a highly annoying voice to the left of his audial.

“Executing my plan to break Brawl’s standing record for the most triple-distilled engex drunk in a single night without burning out the bottom of my fuel tanks or rendering myself incapable of doing my job tomorrow.” Onslaught stopped in the middle of pouring out his next shot into a cube and squinted at the short bot-shaped blur plopping down uninvited on the other side of his booth and… Damn, he recognized that color scheme and that annoying voice. He didn’t need the bond for that. He plainly wasn’t wasted enough if he could recognize it. “Also, frag the Pit off, Swindle. I’m not sharing this time. Get your own drinks. Don’t you have your very own personal bartender?”

Swindle spread his hands out. “Aww. You’re still not a charming drunk when you’re pissed about something, are you?”

“Don’t like it? Do what you’re told and get lost.”

“It’s kinda too late to tell me to frag off, isn’t it?” Swindle said. Onslaught stared uncomprehendingly at him before Swindle tapped a finger on his chest plating, over his spark chamber.

Onslaught scoffed, “Oh, _that’s_ what you want to talk about? Now?”

Swindle’s optics narrowed, unimpressed. “Unless you want to back out of discussing this by getting too overcharged to answer me.”

“Unlike _some mechs_ , I can hold my engex.” Onslaught set the bottle down on the table to join the company of empty cubes. It wobbled. He steadied it. “What’s the big deal? I didn’t hear you or the others complaining about being gestalt once we were back on our feet. Vortex and Brawl rather seem to _enjoy_ it.”

“Yeah, but Vortex and the rest of the crew had a _choice_ , to be gestalt,” Swindle shot back, field crinkling in displeasure. Onslaught threw down his shot with practiced ease. It had a pleasant burn. Swindle tapped his fingers impatiently, “I didn’t. I woke up and I was in one. Didn’t bug me, back when I thought you guys did it to help me out but—”

The truck leaned back in his seat. His back-mounted cannons pressed against the foam cushioning. He raised an optic ridge. “But you found out the truth. Blame the fake memories for giving you the wrong impression. Starscream planted that story of us doing it to save you, not me.”

“Did you care?”

The question brought Onslaught up short. “What?”

Swindle rolled his optics. The unimpressed glow to them was back. “Did you care that you did something to me that changed my spark without my say-so?”

In truth, Onslaught didn’t remember if he had cared. His access to his real memory-files remained blocked.

But Blast Off remembered and he had given them a silted rundown of the events in his memories. (In the prison cell, Blast Off huddled in a ball in the corner, a hand pressed over the cracks in his visor while they grilled him for the information he’d withheld.) Onslaught was familiar with the pattern of his own logic. They matched with the plans Blast Off shared. Onslaught had zero doubt his past self hadn’t taken into account the slightest a trivial factor like what Swindle _felt_ about the other Combaticons combining with him sans his consent and establishing the bond. Swindle had been all but dead: what they did to his corpse after the fact wasn’t relevant. Plus, it had been a step towards tearing down Starscream, the bot who’d offlined him. If anything, his past self would have thought Swindle should grovel and be grateful for their efforts. And the Onslaught of the now agreed.

“Do _you_ think I cared when I did it?” Onslaught asked dryly. “I didn’t give a frag.”

The look on Swindle’s face was as warm as the Acid Wastes. “No, I didn’t think you did. That wouldn’t be like you.”

“You ought to be grateful we did it.”

Swindle sniffed. “ _Grateful_ I’m stuck with you lot? I’m going to have to spent the rest of my functioning with gestalt protocols running in the background to kept happy.”

Onslaught refilled his cube and took a swig. “You’re not an idiot, Swindle. And neither was Starscream. If you hadn’t been more useful to our dear Chosen One alive as a memory-wiped combiner component than dead as his pawn, he wouldn’t have bothered having your processor repaired and just ordered you tossed in a smelter the moment he had your body away from Rattrap and in his hands,” Onslaught mused. The booth swayed. He huffed a laugh. “I doubt he’d do it himself, since he miserably failed to finish the job the _last_ time he shot you. How incompetent.”

Swindle’s mouth twisted. He glanced at the bottle on Onslaught’s side of the booth.

“You make a ‘bot feel so valued as part of the team.”

“And you’re so greedy you squandered the opportunities in the past I permitted you to show proper respect to my authority and the team’s goals. You put your money first. Which do you prefer, being a combiner’s leg or being dead?”

“I can’t make sales if I’m dead,” Swindle responded automatically before sobering up. “I dunno if I would have agreed to be a leg. Maybe I would have, given the right sales pitch for it. But I’m still allowed to be ticked off that you didn’t give me an option,” Swindle’s hand absently inched toward the bottle, under the distraction of his talking. Familiar with this game, Onslaught smacked it away but didn’t tug the bottle out of Swindle’s arms reach.

 _Two_ overlapping Swindles’ arms reach actually, their outlines swimming in and out of focus. Hmm. That was troublesome. One Swindle was a pain in the aft. Swindle by the double was bound to be worse. Frag, had Swindle’s alternate teleported into the booth and decided to gang up on him with Swindle?

Wait, Swindle had said something.

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

Suddenly Swindle’s expression turned slyly thoughtful. “You don’t get it. Fine. Think of it like this. _You_ don’t know if you would have dated Blast Off before the slagfest went down, if you had the choice of saying no. Blast Off was always your favorite, we all knew that. Maybe you would have.”

Onslaught scowled. His ‘favorite’? Blast Off wasn’t his favorite anything. Not anymore. What was Swindle talking about? Swindle’s hand snuck another bid towards the bottle. Still scowling and slower to react, Onslaught batted it off.

“It’s that you wanted the _option_ to say no, even if you were going to say yes, right?”

Onslaught growled when the comparison Swindle was drawing finally sank in. He jabbed a finger at him, forcing his glossa to cooperate. His voice fritzed with static. “Why you! That’s not, the—the circumstances are completely different!”

“Are they?”

“First of all, I wasn’t courting you when I turned you into a limb!”

“Looking at it one way, you used me because you wanted something from me, and Blast Off used you because he wanted you,” Swindle shrugged and tuned out the resulting tirade. He’d made his point, he’d sat through hundreds of similar rages from Onslaught before, and seeing Onslaught drunkenly lose some of his cool soothed his own ire.

While Onslaught was distracted yelling at him, Swindle snagged the unguarded bottle and started pouring its contents into an empty cube. “Pit, I’ve used him and Brawl as muscle to seal a deal in my favor before. I’m not saying you have to forgive him for it. Not saying you even _should_. What he did was fragged up. I’m just saying, you’ve hardly been above using a teammate for your own ends either.” His tone turned curious. “Is Blast Off really coming from such an unfamiliar place?”

Mid-tirade, Onslaught belatedly noticed his bottle had teleported. And was in Swindle’s hand. One of the three Swindles’ hands. Emptied.

“You have some bearings, saying that to my face.”

“Nice to know you’re not so overcharged you can’t understand what I’m talking about.”

“Get. Slagged,” Onslaught said and calmed down. He rubbed his face. “If you’re angry at me for pushing you into the bond, why haven’t you acted on it?” The con-mech had plenty of back-alley ways to make other people’s’ lives miserable without taking them on directly, despite the gestalt programming putting an obstacle in seeing his gestalt-mate dead.

Swindle clicked his glossa, “It’s just business sense. I’ve got other things to focus on. Other promising ventures. It’s not profitable for me to be ticked at you forever, not when we’re stuck with each other.” Swindle glanced at where Blurr was busy behind the bar, clasped his hands around his cube and added, “Even if you’re an overbearing egoist who thinks he’s incapable of coming up with a bad plan and blames other people when you mess up.”

Onslaught stared at him. Then he laughed at his impudence, and pinged a server drone to bring them a new bottle.

“And you’re a greasy, thieving opportunist spawn of a glitch with no scruples who’d sell out Vector Sigma itself for the right price. Don’t drive too far ahead of yourself, Swindle.”

“Flatterer,” Swindle’s grin was crooked and shameless. He held up a cube of stolen triple-distilled engex in a toast before taking a sip, all three of him overlapping. “Love you too, Ons.”

**////**

It’s chance that had Onslaught opening the slates of the metal shutters and glancing out the window from the upper story of the apartment at the same time when Blast Off touched down in alt mode in front of the doorstep and transformed, before Blast Off bristled as a sleek car zipped up and flipped in a whirl of moving metal into a teal and grey mech. Onslaught didn’t place a name to her for a moment.

Lightbright, one of the cityspeakers from the colonies, conjunx to one of Ironhide’s underlings, his databanks supplied. Ah. Conjunx to one of the underlings Blast Off had deceived.

Blast Off’s (too familiar) body language radiated a distinct lack of welcome at her approach.

Down on the street, Lightbright’s lips moved. Blast Off listened. His reply visibly irritated her, armor flaring out. Blast Off’s mask went shadowed. They exchanged words for a few moments, then Lightbright snipped something that made Blast Off look away from her in… Discomfort? Unease? She transformed and sped away again. Blast Off didn’t pursue her. He stood on the doorstep without moving for a while before shaking his helm and walking inside.

When Ironhide had let him into the security forces upon Blast Off feigning a break from his old commander in public, Ironhide had stopped at Blast Off’s name on the enlistment contract, satisfied with the surface concession to Ironhide’s authority. He was willing to push no further and be pleased with Blast Off’s obedience: Ironhide had mistaken it for sincere agreement. He had been fooled. Blast Off had liked Ironhide, had respected him enough to intervene to stop Bruticus from shooting him, but there were plenty of outsider mechs the shuttle had respected just fine that Blast Off hadn’t lifted a finger to help when he allowed them to be thrown to Vortex’ tender attentions or sold off in pieces to Swindle for a quick profit or blown up in a fit of rage by Brawl.

Onslaught had not stopped at his obedience: he hadn’t just wanted that, such a paltry goalpost. He had wanted Blast Off’s _loyalty_ , he had wanted his subordinate devoted to his goals, pledged processor and spark to his leadership.

Blast Off had been one of his proudest long-lasting conquests.

He’d taken Vortex off the streets, seeing value in the criminal’s love of violence, convinced of his ability to keep Vortex reined in, and kept him as his main enforcer before he and Blast Off had met. Sadism had its uses. Brawl and he had spoken the same language, of being sparked military mech who had done their service in the army and then been discarded. Onslaught considered a position of unquestioned command his natural and Primus-given right. Brawl preferred to follow, not lead. Upon this foundation, their rapport had fallen into place. But Blast Off… Blast Off had come after Vortex and Brawl and shared none of those commonalities. He hadn’t been military sparked and he hadn’t been entranced with opportunities to send other mechs’ energon spraying bright across the asphalt.

Blast Off’s indifferent visor eying him in well-guarded distrust over the desk between them as Onslaught offered him the opening bids for employment terms had been a challenge. Onslaught wasn’t one to back down from challenges.

He had been a tough sell, though not as tough as Swindle.

But Onslaught had won him over. He had worked at it, like laying siege to an enemy fortress. He had demonstrated his mettle as commander and there had came a day when Blast Off’s stubborn indifference melted into capitulation. From there, it was just a matter of tempering it like newly-cooling metal into the shape Onslaught wanted.

And then he had committed a mistake. He had taken Blast Off for granted.

He’d grown accustomed to Blast Off’s loyalty as the years passed and the shuttle’s loyalty hadn’t faltered. If anything, it had grown. Where Onslaught decided they went, Blast Off followed at his heel like a good subordinate should. Time went on and Onslaught creased to question it, expected it as a reliable factor.

Blast Off was supposed to be loyal to him.

Onslaught had made a misstep. He had forgotten Blast Off was a decent actor, had mastered the skill of computerizing internal turmoil, portioning it off into boxes and filing it away. He could smile and nod and play at socializing, regardless of whether or not he enjoyed it but the people around him never caught on that it was all superficial, engagement merely on the surface level, that Blast Off had already detached from them, assigned them to a lower rung of priority. Onslaught had _known_ this and he still failed to anticipate that meant under duress Blast Off could be motivated to paste on a smile and be as passable an actor with his team as he was with outsiders.

A decent actor could be a decent liar.

Blast Off wasn’t that sorry about lying to the mechs he had befriended in Ironhide’s security forces.

Blast Off wasn’t sorry he had sparred with his fellow cadets and trained with them and drank with them and joked with them and swapped answers to exams with them, and then left them in the lurch without a backwards glance when he had gotten from them what Onslaught had ordered him to look for.

He liked them and bore them no malice but also no loyalty. They had been a means to an end. Onslaught’s plans came first.

Blast Off had been a sniper in the war, with deadly precision, the aerial support when Vortex was too busy shoving his claws into the nearest Autobot’s optic sockets to get airborne and cover the grounders. He took out enemies from afar. He hadn’t had to deal with the impact of his actions close-up like a frontliner did.

He had to now.

**////**

The front door slid open and Swindle and Brawl tromped inside into the middle of a shouting match.

“—blew his wages on engex so he could drink himself offline every night. And _Vortex_! Primus, Vortex wasn’t any better, he found every odd job we scrouged up for him so boring he wasted his credits on circuit boosters!” Blast Off’s voice clipped off the last words, raising for a moment before his volume dropped.

Field spiking aggressively, Onslaught snapped back in a low tone. “And that’s your justification for it? We’ve had rough patches before.”

“During the war. This was different!”

“Oh, was it? _Just_ because this one hits while the war isn’t happening, so you might as well go to the very mech responsible for us getting stuck in a slum with the rest of the Decepticons—”

“I,” Blast Off said, visibly struggling to keep his voice from shaking. “Did not ask for Starscream approach me. I was in a _coma_. I didn’t _go_ to him.”

Onslaught roared, engine gunning. The vibrations shook the floor.

“ _Spare me_. You still took what he offered you and benefited by it. He offered you a way to have _me_. You _lied_ to me so Starscream could use me. That whole time, when we were alone, you could’ve told me the truth and I could’ve done something about it. You didn’t. And your justification is that the team wasn’t—”

“I knew it was wrong! But I didn’t know what else to do! Not then!” Blast Off burst out. “And it’s not a justification! I’m not justifying it! What Airachnid did to you, to the team, it wasn’t right! But I’m trying to make you see, we weren’t making ends meet, our approach wasn’t _working_. I didn’t know what to do! And you weren’t addressing it! You spent your time brooding, or looking for a dead mech in Metroplex’s sewers!”

Onslaught drew in a sharp vent of air through his ventilation systems, but Blast Off interrupted.

“I kept wondering, why didn’t you do anything? They wouldn’t listen to me, not really but you’re the leader. They’d listen to you. We respect you. That’s why you’re the leader! That’s why the Combaticons follow you! You and not some other mech!” Blast Off’s voice broke, the words scraping raw against each other.

He held out his hands, palms beseechingly turned up and looked at Onslaught with a hopeless yearning that he couldn’t mask, couldn’t even try to. Like his spark was trying to twist out of his chassis. His visor shone over-bright. “You’re brilliant, Onslaught! Did you just not _want_ to see we were falling apart even before Bruticus?”

A clattering noise pierced his words.

Argument breaking off, Onslaught and Blast Off’s helms swung in unison towards the source of the noise with the air of cyberhounds spotting a stray pedro-rabbit skittering past.

“... —Hey, Onslaught! Sir! Blast Off!” Frozen mid-step, Swindle raised his hands in placation, smiling nervously.

Swindle inched slowly backwards until his back plating clanged into Brawl’s very wide front. “Haha. Ha. Don’t mind us, we were, just... Uh... Leaving! That’s right, we were going to grab my set of adaptors from Brawl’s room, but I just so happened to remember I left it in a different place. Not Brawl’s room! My mistake, sir. Right, Brawl?”

“Erm, right!” Brawl had already taken one look inside and backpedalled halfway out the door. “Swindle’s right, we’re gonna be leaving right now. Sorry, boss. Didn’t mean to get in the middle of anything! Just looking for those...—Uh. What did you say we’re looking for?”

“Adaptors!” Swindle squeaked.

Brawl nodded, continuing to sidle out of missile firing range as stealthily as a massive tank could, which was not at all. “YEAH adaptors, which are somewhere else. Be back later!” He fled. Swindle followed Brawl’s lead and beat it into the open street. The two Combaticons barely waited to hit the road before transforming and streaking off down the lane.

An uncomfortable silence spooled out after they left.

Blast Off deflated. He sagged, wings twitching, his shoulders scrunching together and mask in place as it had been the whole argument. Shame flashed across his demeanor. “I… I shouldn’t have made them listen to that. I shouldn’t have said anything,” He turned away and stepped towards the stairs.

“Oh, sure,” hissed Onslaught, embittered and pouring fresh fuel on an oil fire. Blast Off looking at him like a starving mech looked at energon had sent prickles racing hot and heady across his sensor network. “Keep running away. I should start bribing you to not hide from your problems, a bribe seems to work best with you.”

Blast Off whipped around, hands balling up into fists. “What—do you WANT justifications? Do you _want_ me to tell you all the pathetic little excuses I made up in my head for what I let Starscream do to you? That’s how this argument got started! Do you want details?”

“No, this argument got _started_ because I’ve come to realize we have a couple of fundamental disagreements about the war.”

Blast Off’s stance shifted, fists loosening. His body cues screamed caution. “The war.”

“Is there another war we fought that I should be aware of?” Onslaught replied. He studied him without speaking for a long beat. He ground out, like the mere idea was difficult for Onslaught to comprehend, “You didn’t want the war to come back.”

Blast Off’s tiny flinch was answer enough by itself.

Onslaught said, “You knew I wanted to revive the cause and that necessitated bringing back the war. You’ve never said a word about _you_ wanting the same thing.”

“No. I… didn’t.”

“Why not?” Onslaught questioned.

“We fought a war and came out the losing side. Maybe I didn’t want a repeat of that,” Blast Off weakly deflected. Onslaught had the impression Blast Off was scowling at him.

Onslaught snarled. “You mean, you wanted us to roll over and give up without a fight? Wanted us to let the Autobots and the neutrals and the deserters enjoy the spoils they didn’t earn, and leave us picking at their leftovers!”

“Don’t be absurd! Why would I ever want that? I hated that too!” Blast Off said. And there it was! Blast Off’s old defiance, so long absent, briefly lighting up again as if from a bank of damp, smothered coal and burning through to the surface. “But we lost! We had to move on, not ‘roll over,’ Onslaught, and nobody was trying. _You_ weren’t trying. You refused to even think about it!”

“What was there to move on _to_?” Onslaught said. “This Cybertron might have never known the war, but our Cybertron was nothing but battle scars by the end. Nobody could have build a lasting peace on the back of that!”

“You don’t know that. Not for certain,” Blast Off protested.

“I’m supported by the historical record. Cybertron is quite prone to becoming a planet-sized battleground,” was Onslaught’s reply.

“But people were trying! Why shouldn’t they try? There’s not enough reasons left to fight anymore! Megatron’s dead. Prime’s dead, Galvatron’s dead. The Senate’s ancient history, the Council is melted slag. Everybody who took us to war is gone.”

“The Cybertronians who fought the war are still here. _We’re_ still here. That’s reason enough.”

Blast Off’s field twisted unhappily. “We don’t _have_ to keep fighting the war!’

“You wouldn’t knock it off about that?”

“There are other things besides the war you could’ve focused on!”

“And by other things, I assume you mean _you_ ,” Onslaught cut in. He sneered behind his mask. Onslaught was running hot. He took a step forward, Blast Off took an automatic step back. His defiance faltered, short-lived. “Why, Blast Off, if you needed a good hard frag so desperately, why didn’t you just go find a buymech with my paintjob and frame type and get it out of your systems? It would’ve saved you and me both a great deal of trouble.”

Blast Off’s visor widened first in confusion, then in stricken hurt.

“I didn’t!” His face crumbled. Ever since they arrived on New Cybertron—no, ever since the jail cell, Blast Off’s composure has been wadded together with bits of metaphorical tape and spit, and fragile in a fashion Onslaught had never seen from him before. “That's not what I... ! That isn’t, you think the reason I would’ve agreed to... to that was just because I wanted to interface with you? For that? I went along with it because I couldn’t bear to watch you be destroyed, Onslaught! I wanted to protect you!”

Then he clamped a hand over his mask as if he could take back what he’d said aloud. Onslaught’s gaze narrowed to a thin band of red.

“Run that by me again.”

Blast Off backed up. Onslaught advanced. He seized Blast Off by the forearm.

“Ack!”

“I thought Brawl was just blathering drivel, that he thought you believed us being together was about making me happy—but it’s more than that, isn’t it? What aren’t you telling me? Or what did you tell me before I didn’t notice?” Onslaught asked roughly. The bond twinged.

“It’s not important anymore anyway,” Blast Off muttered, not looking at him. “Just, forget it.”

“You’ve mistaken me saying that as a request. It wasn’t.” The truck turned on his heel, gripping his wrist, and hauled Blast Off upstairs. Blast Off yelped.

“What are you doing?” Blast Off stumbled in his wake after Onslaught gave his arm a particularly hard jerk.

A solution came together in Onslaught’s helm.

“You’re claiming you had an ulterior motive to what you did besides getting under my armor. I’m giving you an opportunity to prove it in a way you can’t lie about.” Onslaught had turned one of the spare rooms into his office. He tugged Blast Off over the threshold before he let go of his wrist and crossed the office floor. Blast Off eyed the sofa next to the wall like it was rigged with a bomb.

“Shut the door. Come here,” Onslaught ordered and sat down, unfurling the connector cable from his forearm and holding it out.

Standing like a statue by the threshold, Blast Off flinched and looked from the cable to the door. His electromagnetics fluctuated rapidly, morphing from trepatiation to longing to resignation.

“ _Now_ ,” Onslaught barked, impatient.

Blast Off shut the door. “Yes, sir.”

It beeped and locked behind him.

Blast Off sat down on the sofa too and hesitated, but cycled in a vent and took the cable. He opened the panel cover where his neck and the base of his helm met and plugged it deep into the receiving port underneath, sinking the jack in, before retracting the panel on his forearm. Instead of waiting for him to unspool the cable inside it, Onslaught reached out, grabbed the connector cable and pushed it into his own corresponding port, hooking them up. The hardline connection established itself, flickers of current jumping hungrily across it. It felt gratifying.

The closed bond flashed to life and they knew better to resist as it opened, protocols eagerly syncing their systems together without their conscious wishes. Blast Off grimaced as he fought the urge to move closer, entwine his field with Onslaught’s field until they pulsed to the same rhythm. Onslaught’s fingers twitched dangerously: he wasn’t immune to the programming’s urging on his side of the link. Blast Off kept his hands and his field to himself. Forcibly pushing the bond back down to dormancy rather than allow it to take over took mutual concentration.

It subsided.

After exchanging a few data pulses back and forth to check the connection was up and running smoothly, Onslaught’s presence flooded into his processor. A familiar sensation, mind to mind, except for the disdainful tint to it.

Blast Off dropped his firewalls, opening access locks and peeling back the thick outer protections first, then the inner ones layer by layer. Interlocked internal firewalls folded down, then external firewalls. He left key parts of himself defenseless. (If Onslaught wanted to, with the way they had arranged the cables—the greater range of access granted to the truck, his firewalls remaining up, and Blast Off’s firewalls down—the amount of damage he could inflict on Blast Off’s mind was immense. Even if the backlash on Onslaught from the gestalt bond would hurt. It was… a possibility.)

Onslaught felt Blast Off’s mind shifting, letting him further in. His systems were neat and ordered, boundaries clearly outlined and without Blast Off’s firewalls coldly bristling up in a demand to _not touch_ at him, accessible and vivid.

He went for the memory banks. Blast Off was paging through the dense files already, shuffling the non-relevant ones out of the way as Onslaught searched through him, moving further back in the dates of the logs. Onslaught ignored the mute dread in the background from the shuttle.

A blank space after Bruticus’ first combination. Then:

_ <Here.> _

Blast Off isolated and passed him the file. It was tagged with the identifications for ‘recharge system flux’ and ‘true event.’ Onslaught accessed it. The memory-file unfurled, conjuring up a room Onslaught didn’t recognize—a double recharge slab, a room, a window, a dawn breaking bright blue outside. Two people he _did_ recognize, sharing the double berth. He watched dream-Blast Off stir on the berth, a hand on his helm. Onslaught watched his dream-self lean over him and press his mask against the side of his helm in a kiss.

He was about to shut it, and scold Blast Off for showing him a scene that hadn’t happened instead of what he had asked for, before Blast Off stopped him.

 _< Just keep watching.>_ Blast Off said.

He could sense Blast Off’s profound humiliation, that Onslaught was witnessing this memory, his desire to self-censor out parts—but Blast Off refrained. Blast Off let it play out, unedited and wretching. The flirting, thinking himself unobserved and free to indulge. Starscream’s intrusion, Starscream’s pointed mockery, dream-Blast Off’s indignation giving way to building distress. His dream-self, propped up in place. The bait, dream-Blast Off’s refusal to buy it, his resolution to stay strong, then the taunts, the threats, the reminders of things Blast Off did his best to not think about or adknowledge to himself. Then, dream-Blast Off’s resistance starting to crumple. Each sentence, a puncture wound to his shields. The feeling of being trapped by walls closing in on all sides.

Starscream’s hands on his shoulders. The touch disgusted him. He hated Starscream. _Just one last enormous lie, to grant yourself and Onslaught some form of happiness, to dodge that oh-so-terrible fate of watching the mech you adore be destroyed by the one enemy he can’t outsmart_ , Starscream said in so many words into his audial, smirking. _Is that such a terrible price to pay? To save him from himself, you selfish little fool? Isn’t this what you wanted, what you will never gain without_ my _generosity?_

A crack in his resolutions. Think fast. Two choices and an impending deadline with the void in seconds. The lie or the void?

He already knew which one he picked.

The memory-file closed.

 _< So you won't let me destroy myself,>_ Onslaught said bitingly after he managed to digest what he had seen. _< But you'll let our enemies violate my mind and use me to their ends. Interesting double standard there, Blast Off. I'd call it tactically unsound.>_

Blast Off’s guilt swamped the connection anew. _< I didn’t want to hurt you! Or the team. I wanted to help. I tried to. I _meant _to help. >_

_ <I’d hate to see your idea of sabotage then.> _

Blast Off winced. He looped a segment of his cable around his black finger, visor dimming. His face heated with humiliation. _<... I probably deserve that remark.>_

 _< You do.> _Onslaught said and dug further through his processor. Brushing the truck’s thoughts revealed he was still angry that his courtship had been brought on by a bribe to convince Blast Off to behave. And behind that anger lurked a wound.

Blast Off went silent.

Then he sent another memory-file. Onslaught yanked it open—the end of a shift, Blast Off demanding Starscream let him see Swindle alive and well, demanding he keep his end of the bargain. Starscream leading him down a hallway. Airachnid repairing the exposed circuitry in Swindle’s chest, Blast Off’s feet taking him to Swindle’s side. See? It wasn’t perfect, but he’d gotten Swindle back. He hadn’t let Starscream leave the team at his mercy in a coma. He had kept them out of the slum. He had helped that much.

 _< I’ll take that into due consideration,>_ Onslaught said coolly and closed the file.

_< Yes, sir.>_

Through the hardline connection he could feel Blast Off mentally squirming, uncomfortable with the open exposure induced as memory-file glimpses of the times where he’d acted on Starscream’s orders to keep Onslaught from noticing the mnemosurgery scrolled past, and Onslaught watched them. Still, Blast Off didn’t resist him. Onslaught said. _< I can’t accuse you of incompetence in deception at least.>_

 _< Lying to you didn’t make me happy.>_ Blast Off said.

He almost lurched off the sofa at Onslaught’s sudden desire to strike him transmitting through the cables. _<_ Funny _. I would have_ never _guessed, given how you acted when we went out. Weren’t you happy then? Did you just_ conveniently _forget so you could enjoy yourself? > _

Was he that hungry for a scrap of romantic affection from Onslaught he’d delude himself into buying Starscream’s slag about just a _—_?

 _< Please don’t. Not right now.>_ Blast Off was a churning mass of raw emotions that fought to articulate themselves and failed. Errors popped up. He bit down into his lower lip. _< Please. I’m sorry. I didn’t want to lie.> _

That did it.

_ <If you hated lying to me, why do it at all—!?> _

Acting on impulse, Onslaught delved further in, deeper back despite Blast Off’s twitch juddering down the cables. He had to know. When did this… this feeling begin, this absurd belief that Blast Off needed to protect him, why did Blast Off feel like this for him, tell him, show him. He pushed too far and the boundaries between them blurred. Blast Off gave way.

Blast Off cared about his team of monsters. It was a wary and very selfish affection, but it was true. He didn’t want to be alone. He wanted to stay with them. He was afraid to admit it.

He dreaded the risk that there would be a day when he went home and found Brawl’s inability to curb his engex had caused irreparable damage and he wouldn’t hear the idiot yammering obnoxiously about the latest explosive he set up ever again, because Brawl was Brawl and eternally incapable of staying down after a punch, and also the one who liked the team together just as much as Blast Off did.

Blast Off hadn’t realized how much he had missed Swindle dropping in and out of their routine, the no-good scammer, and how relieving it had been to find him until he had standing next to the medical slab while Swindle pointed at the torn metal around the hole in his chest and joked how he was lucky the boss was footing the bill. _It’s good to see you, Swindle_. That hadn’t been a lie.

He didn’t understand how Vortex’s train of thought worked no matter how many times they merged and his past-times were revolting and he was always touching and prodding where Blast Off didn’t want him to—but there was an easy click when they went on missions together, Vortex grinning carelessly and pulling out a blade and Blast Off’s gun in the shuttle’s hand, two parts moving in concert—and he wouldn’t swap the helicopter for another mech if the world depended on it because that was Vortex’s slot in the team and nobody was allowed in it but Vortex.

—and _Onslaught_.

Oh, Onslaught. The mere thought of Onslaught dying tore a hole through Blast Off’s spark.

Onslaught pulled back, disturbed by the tide of genuine grief. But Blast Off took him in, spark skipping a beat, and where did this begin? A long time ago he had realized it. Onslaught _mattered_ to him. Blast Off wanted him to be happy because it was natural to want somebody he cared for to be so and unbearable to see him otherwise in the aftermath of the war, Blast Off’s mind said. A memory-file of him looking skeptically at Onslaught over the desk between him when Onslaught hired him onto his mercenary band before the war. He hadn’t cared then. Blast Off had shrugged him off as just another temporary boss. Just another grounder among the many Blast Off had worked for.

How wrong he’d been. More memories, more insight; the years in which he drew more and more into Onslaught’s orbit. Indifference eventually became grudging respect. Respect grew into cautious liking and then into affection and then into loyalty and the closeness of a comrade-in-arms and the trust of a confidant.

And with it, slowly, the awareness of not just Onslaught’s brilliance but of Onslaught’s other virtues, in addition to his flaws: his wit, his boldness, his willingness to turn any situation to his advantage, even his irritating habit of putting back the datapads in the _wrong order_ on the shelf after he was finished reading them. His smile.

Desire had come casually. At first he had assumed that was all it was.

But he’d already fallen for him over a thousand little acts, by the time he’d realized it was not just physical desire but helm-over-thrusters infatuation.

Them fighting side-by-side on the battlefield together, flying back to dank barracks after a supply run gone wrong. Onslaught thundering in exasperation at Vortex for stealing Brawl’s stash of oil cakes to buy off a favor from Swindle while Blast Off rolled his optics at him before burying his nose into a datapad. Onslaught congratulating him after a mission’s success. Onslaught handing him his hologram projector of old solar system maps he’d retrieved with the rest of the salvage they’d brought back after an Autobot raid had wrecked their latest command center, and telling him to be more careful of his belongings, since it looked rare and expensive and once the war’s over, Onslaught doubted there would be many Cybertronians left who would sell Blast Off a replacement.

Seeing himself through Blast Off’s optics left him floundering.

Onslaught was baffled. He didn’t know how to respond to the feelings Blast Off harbored for him or the dream he’d been shown. That was—he didn’t know what he had expected. He had completely forgotten or overlooked half of those moments, like the hologram projector he’d salvaged on a whim. He had expected... Something grand, something defining, to explain the continuity of a crush that had gone unreciprocated for millenia and yet driven Blast Off to such lengths. It didn’t make sense. Where was the logic in falling for him just because he—

—The hardline broke and their minds separated as Blast Off pulled Onslaught’s connector cable out of his port. Even as he hurried, he was careful to not dent the jack. Blast Off thrust it at Onslaught and scrambled off the sofa. His mask was gone. When he had retracted it?

“If feelings were about logic,” Blast Off said tightly, and it was impossible to distinguish if it was rage or if it was resignation ripping the words out of his vocalizer in harsh chunks. “My spark would have picked somebody attainable to fall for, don’t you think? Somebody I stood a chance in the Pit with.”

The shuttle was out the door before Onslaught could stop him. It closed behind him.

Elbows braced on his knees, Onslaught put his helm in his hands, and cursed that he couldn’t order the migraine coiling behind his temples to get lost with the same ease he could his teammates. He felt hollowed out.

**////**

Blast Off only came back down from an orbit in space over half a day later, armor still steaming from the heat of breaking back into the atmosphere. After a few aborted stops-and-starts-and-stops-again and a full three days of pretending-not-to-look-at-another then-fixedly-staring at-each-other’s-backs, Onslaught and Blast Off compromised with strained attempts at small talk about harmless topics rather than pulling out an excuse to leave the room or ignore one another when they were in the same location together.

Brawl was optimistic about this development.

Meanwhile Vortex and Swindle eyed their teammates like one tended to eye the progress of a lone platoon crossing a minefield.

**////**

“I found what we’ll be needing,” Swindle triumphantly slapped the stack of datapads down on the table.

Four visors, three red and one purple, looked at him.

Vortex paused mid-insult with his claws still buried in the gap between the thick armor plates of Brawl’s hip. He’d been fishing around for a rock—whose removal everybody at the table hoped would shut up Brawl’s cranky complaints—that had gotten wedged inside, trying to nab it without tearing out any of the sensitive wires. Brawl was a big enough afthead to make his discomfort everybody else’s headache. Visor dimmed as if he was still half in recharge, Blast Off wrapped his hands around his morning cube of fuel and raised an optic ridge at Swindle.

“Be needing what?” Brawl parroted.

“You’ve located one that fits my specifications?” Onslaught sat with his back struts ramrod straight, ignoring Brawl. He took a datapad from the stack and started scanning through it. Blast Off straightened up in his chair.

Swindle replied. “W-elllll, in a manner of speaking.”

“Ohh, right, that! You found a surgeon to fix our minds without messing it up even mor— _Ow_! Frag!” Brawl had tried to awkwardly shift around only for Vortex to pinch hard at wires in the tank's hip. It was an irately-delivered reminder that Vortex didn't want his claws crushed by the armor's gap closing shut, and that if Brawl moved again, Vortex wouldn't just be graciously removing a rock from his hip, he'd remove Brawl's useless _vocalizer_ from his stupid _throat_. Brawl stopped moving.

Swindle’s armor fluffed out cheerfully.

“Yeah. See, when we arrived on-planet, we didn’t have the money for one to operate on us,” Swindle said. He took a moment to mourn his poor bank accounts, filled with credits and undeservedly destroyed by Unicron in an act of _true vileness_. The other Combaticons were unimpressed. “And we couldn’t just kidnap a surgeon and threaten them to do it for us because that’d give a ‘potential hostile’—your words, not mine, Onslaught—a clear shot at screwing us over.”

“... This is paperwork for an appointment at a government facility,” Onslaught said without looking up from the datapad, displeased. That was decidedly against his specifications. “Swindle.” He didn’t trust the government and Swindle didn’t either. “Does a word of what I say to you pass through your audials?”

“Now, now. Don’t let the electronic stamp on the first page put you off too much, boss! It’s not actually a government operation! It’s just government- _subsidized_ , if you follow my drift,” Swindle corrected. He waved a hand, “The stamp’s just there to prove it’s a legal clinic that follows the latest rules.” He crossed his arms. “Remember how the medics’ coalition up top got those shiny new laws passed a few months ago? It included some insanely strict restrictions and regulations on mnemosurgery. Nobody wants to get caught doing _illegal_ mnemosurgery right now.”

Vortex dug his claws into Brawl. “Isn’t the coalition that rustbucket Flatline’s backing?”

“Him, Glit, and the two Ratchets,” Blast Off said quietly. He took a datapad.

“What’s that gotta’ do with us getting our heads fixed?” Brawl interrupted, still locked in place. Vortex worked the rock free of the joints in his hip and dropped it onto the floor, then sprawled back in his chair.

“Why, I’m so glad you asked!” Swindle snapped his fingers. “The Functionists who used to run the show on New Cybertron were terribly needle-happy about keeping people in line, so there’s truckloads of mechs wandering around with screwed-up heads, missing time, missing _words_ , the works. They create a demand; they want the damage patched up. That’s where supply comes in. The mechs up top set up funds for a program. _All_ about helping the victims, and such good will.” He swiped a datapad and held it up so they could see the video playing on the screen; the opening of a medical clinic, one of the medics standing up to give a speech.

“They’ve opened others as part of the same program, but _this_ clinic specializes in treating unwanted mnemosugery.” Swindle winked. “More importantly, people who get appointments don’t have to pay.”

“It’s free?” Vortex said. Brawl and Blast Off exchanged glances.

“Bingo! It means we can go in, get Airachnid’s shadowplay flushed out, and we wouldn’t have to pay a credit. It’s legally sanctioned, we’ll get patients rights so we can sue if they try to pull one over us.” Swindle beamed, in his element. The jeep was eager to get his real memories back. They were his property after all, and Swindle had no taste for Airachnid’s theft of them. “I read the fine print. Every word. They’ll be sorry if they do.”

“I’ll check over your work for myself,” Onslaught turned his attention back to the pile of datapads. “If this passes muster, we’ll go for it.”

**////**

The mnemosurgeon was lanky and armored with blocky dark green and white plating. The empty sockets that had once harbored blue optics stayed professionally distant when he pulled back from the pathway he’d made into Onslaught’s brain module and gave the diagnosis: a set of falsified memories, a cerebral implantation of a foreign idea with attached code to augment and ensure its influence, and minor tampering and further alterations sliced into his emotional circuitry. It matched with the damage described by the patient forms the Combaticons had filled out. (Getting the appointments scheduled had entailed paperwork. Swindle was insistent it was faster to file for treatment as a group case. Not the least because it would make a lawsuit more potent if matters went awry.)

The other Cybertronian recognized the handiwork he had found as Eukarian; the mnemosurgeons hailing from Eukaris had a distinctive touch.

Onslaught had expected the diagnosis.

What he hadn’t anticipated was the specifics the mnemosurgeon provided on it. His core personality data was untouched, his interface preferences unaltered. No feelings had been _heightened_ by the tampering. Instead, the emotional alterations had been tailored for the opposite: a dampening of his preoccupation with the war and several secondary interests splintered off from it.

“In any case, you’re fortunate, as is the rest of your gestalt I examined,” the mnemosurgeon moved the subject along, rubbing his wrist. “This Airachnid didn’t delete the stored processor data for your memories, only block your access to them and replace them with false memories. That saves us time. Many aren’t so lucky. I’d imagine she did it because she planned for them to serve as a subconscious base for the procedure to re-interpret and supply the personal details of your life she wasn’t familiar with.”

He tapped his audial. “The mind naturally seeks to rationalize what it encounters to itself. A lie told to it is more believable if based on something true.”

Onslaught turned around on the chair to glare at him, a poor temper ensuring he was utterly not in the mood for inane philosophizing. “And? You can fix the memories, I presume. You’ve said as much to my subordinates when they were in here.”

The mnemosurgeon picked up a cloth off a tray filled with equipment and dabbed the energon off the needles protruding from his fingers.

“I’ll be able to restore that access and remove the false memories,” the mnemosurgeon said. “As for the shadowplay… That will take a little longer, it’s delicate work, especially on a live subject, but doable. The foreign idea and the emotional alterations can be deleted. As long as it’s done correctly by a neurospecialist, there shouldn’t be negative side-effects.”

Onslaught shuttered his optics behind his visor for a moment. He suppressed his hostility. Then he turned his back on the surgeon.

“Get on with it then.”

“Very well.”

Highbrow put the cloth down and lined up his fingers.

**////**

The mnemosurgeon brushed himself off and left the room to give Onslaught a moment to himself before he went back to the waiting room. Onslaught paced. Two sets of puncture marks in his neck now. His real memories laid out before him.

The picture they painted wasn’t pretty.

The intensity of the renewed desire to tear out Starscream’s spark and crush it in his hands burned. That smug, conniving rust-riddled slagger… ! Starscream had outplayed Onslaught in an arena that caught him flat-footed and off-guard. It stung Onslaught’s pride like a bucket of acid. Onslaught gritted his denta. Starscream must have relished having somebody who wanted him dismantled tricked into loyally trotting after him.

But Starscream _was_ dead, Onslaught couldn’t kill him, and it was futile to waste his anger on a dead mech. He stowed it away.

And if Onslaught had hoped the access to the real memories would shed light on how to handle Blast Off, his hopes were dashed.

Airachnid hadn’t fabricated his attraction to Blast Off. Instead she _had_ repressed the _alternative_ interests to him that had held his attention (or had the potential to have led to a coup against Starscream), to achieve the effect she was after. Combined with the implanted nudge, the false memories that didn’t include Starscream’s reneging on their original deal or the aggravations of a life on the wrong side of the city scraping by day-to-day and his assumption Blast Off was trustworthy, Onslaught had bought the manipulation. He’d taken the bait. An artificial cocktail for attraction. Hook, line, and sinker.

 _Frag_ that spider too.

If only a mech could be killed by Vortex more than once.

In the false memories, Blast Off had stopped the rest of them from turning Ironhide into slag on the spot because he was the only one who had kept his helm together and not panicked completely after the pain of a dead limb drove Bruticus berserk.

In reality, Blast Off had stopped the rest of them from killing Ironhide because _Ironhide isn’t the target! Windblade isn’t either! Stop! They’re just patsies! We need to get our actual target! We’ll kill the ones who need killing then and expose Starscream! We’ll have justice!_ And Onslaught hadn’t cared. Justice? Who gave a rusty bolt about justice? All he had seen was an opportunity to take out his rage and destroy everybody getting in their way, getting in the way of the mission, just like the good old days, Blast Off’s frantic energy twisting into Vortex’s violent joy in the unfolding chaos melding into Brawl’s tendency to hit all problems put in front of him until they stopped moving draining into the dead limb maddening Bruticus.

What rattled him was how _little_ the rest of the memories about Blast Off changed.

The times he had idly touched Blast Off were still there.

His hand resting on Blast Off’s back kibble when Onslaught led him inside the cramped apartment when the riots were starting, his fingers curled around Blast Off’s forearm as he pulled him into his room alone for a full report, his arm slung companionally around the mech’s shoulders as he told Blast Off he was proud of him in the alleyway, Blast Off stepping close as he held the Enigma in his hands, even closer, Blast Off in Bruticus unable to hold the team up alone, faltering, a part of him and him a part of Blast Off, screaming out to him _Onslaught! Help!_ and _Onslaught! We’re losing control!_ as Onslaught was busy combing through Swindle’s fraying mind.

All of it before Ironhide had fired on Bruticus and Onslaught had woken up in Starscream’s medbay unable to remember what had happened.

He remembered now.

Since finding out the truth, Onslaught had assumed those were details edited in by the mnemosurgeon, to seed in the context to justify his own abrupt (fake) interest. Twisting the scenes so his mind mistaked the shadowplay for a natural progression of emotion. But they weren’t. He had been touching Blast Off casually, even if he hadn’t needed to, when they were alone or when it was only them and the rest of the team for thousands of years.

He didn’t routinely put a hand on Vortex or Brawl like that in either set of memories.

And the whole affair—

Vortex, lounging casual and deadly as a knife on the lip of the park fountain. _He didn’t have a thing for you when the war started._

Swindle, rolling his big optics at him across the table. _Blast Off was always your favorite, we all knew that._

Brawl, handing him a cube of coolant. _He went about it in a really dumb way, but it sounds like he wanted you to be happy and Starscream talked him into thinking that was how he could do it._

Blast Off, standing next to the medical platform, smiling faintly and not quite meeting his visor. _Just plotting against you, boss_.

Frankly, this whole affair was a lousy joke by the universe at his expense. What had his life devolved to, a cheap holodrama?

**////**

In the sterile hallway Blast Off was leaning against the wall and waiting for him before he reached the waiting room. The shuttle perked up. Anxiety was awash in his field, just like the pale fluorescent lighting washing over them and reflecting off the metal walls from the ceiling lights. “It worked? They took it out?”

Onslaught regarded him probingly, visor flickering.

“It’s gone,” Onslaught said finally, because it _was_ gone. He hadn’t managed to pinpoint it before but in its absence, like running his glossa over the empty space left by a missing denta, he could finally distinguish where the little urge to _pay attention, look at Blast Off_ had been in the back of his processor. It had been a quiet nudge, not overwhelming and so he hadn’t noticed it as something _off_. The edits had been deleted, but the want…—wasn’t gone. Onslaught’s spark twisted in its chamber. It have been simpler if the feelings had been surgically cut out with the edits. It had diminished slightly, but the _want_ was still there. The hook buried in his internals twinged.

What if the nudge had lingering effects, like a dent left imprinted in a sheet of metal even after the offending object was removed?

Not that the mnemosurgeon had mentioned that was a risk, but what if… ?

Unaware of Onslaught’s conflicted thoughts, Blast Off’s anxiety melted into a surge of bittersweet relief and happiness. As if he’d been tracking a silent countdown for weeks and now the clock had hit zero. He moved so he was standing in front of Onslaught in the middle of the hallway. “That’s good. That’s—that’s fantastic. Then I have something to say. To you.” He coughed. Coolant rose in his cheeks. “Can I?”

“It can’t wait?” Onslaught asked, attention still turned inward. “Fine. What do yo—”

Blast Off spit it out in one fast, stumbling ventilation:

“I love you.”

It was tender and honest.

Onslaught almost took a step back.

“I’m sorry for betraying you. I’m _sorry_ for what I let happen to you, I know that doesn’t make up for it, but I still am and I always will be.” Blast Off gave him a defiant look, edged with regret, over the top of his collar faring. He put a hand over his chest, near the seams of the plating that hide the pulsing of his spark. “But I’m not sorry I love you. That’s mine. That comes from _me_. I love _you_. Onslaught. I don’t want anybody else.”

That he loved Onslaught and that he had betrayed Onslaught were two seperate things to Blast Off because they had to be. He would apologize for one but never for the other. It didn’t matter if Onslaught was a monster. Not right now. He knew what Onslaught was. He’d ran dry on tears over that. Better to love a fellow monster than be alone.

The defiance and happiness faded, replaced entirely by regret. His hand dropped back down to his side. Blast Off swallowed, intake working. “I _am_ sorry it was used against you.” His lips pressed into a shaky line. “You trusted me and I… I took advantage of that to try and force you into something you didn’t feel or want. Your trust meant the galaxy to me and I destroyed it.”

Blast Off cast his optics down at his thrusters. “And now that you’re back to normal, if you want me gone, I’ll go.”

Suddenly why Blast Off was choosing now to re-confess his feelings made sense.

And it wouldn’t kill him to separate from the gestalt. It would hurt, physically pain him to go— but it wouldn’t kill him.

Onslaught’s expression was unreadable.

“And if I took you up on that? What if I ordered you to pack your things and get your aft out of the city by tomorrow? Told you to never show your face in front of me again?”

“Would that make you happier?” Blast Off twisted his hands together. Onslaught looked steadily at him and refused to answer him. Blast Off searched his face and in-vented at whatever he saw there, vents rattling. His voice came out small. “I’d go, if that’s what you want, to ease your mind.” The calm face he was slapping on had a crack in it. “You’re the leader. If you say I’m not a member of the Combaticons anymore, then I’m not.”

Blast Off didn’t say _because I love you I’ll leave_. Blast Off didn’t say _because I’m sorry I’ll leave_. He attached no qualifications about his own feelings into the offer. Here was what he put on the table: _if you would be better off without me I’ll leave_.

What Blast Off was offering was escape from each other, him away from Onslaught and Onslaught away from him. True severance was impossible due to the bond, but this was the closest they could get.

It was tempting. A quick solution.

All Onslaught had to do was agree.

And Blast Off would be out of his life and Onslaught wouldn’t need to even _think_ about him ever again. Out of sight, out of mind.

And out of his possession. The truck’s visor flared. Blast Off had been his to covet, and even if he hadn’t taken him to berth, even if the (fake) pull on his thoughts was deleted, Blast Off was his to reprimand. His, his, his. He would have his greying frame recycled before he allowed Starscream’s manipulations to take away what belonged to him. Onslaught had written his claim onto Blast Off before the war started. It would damn well outlast the war.

“That’s true,” he said. Blast Off clenched his hands into fists. His engine hitched in preparation for a blow, bracing for his rejection. Onslaught lifted a finger. “Unfortunately, you’re already scheduled for your shifts for the rest of the week and I’m not in the mood to hunt down a replacement on short notice.”

“Huh?”

Blast Off’s engine caught and stalled completely for a few seconds, sputtering.

As Blast Off gaped at him, Onslaught stretched out a hand and put it on his shoulder vent. Under it, he could feel Blast Off’s engine perform what sounded like a labored throttle. He rumbled. “I expect you know better than to be late. Don’t ask me if you can leave again, unless you have a substitute in mind.”

**////**

The local hall of records left its archives open to access by the public.

The archives were in pitiful shape. What the war had destroyed in his timeline, the Functionist regime’s purges had repeatedly censored and revised and trimmed down to a sorry sight.

The computer terminal beeped when it found what Onslaught was methodically searching for. His alternate and he had the same origins, sparked to the military class but in the other timeline, his alternate had not left the army. Under Functionism, he wasn’t allowed to.

It was a peek into a different history played out with familiar faces. Instead of the path he took that led him to join the Decepticons, the other Onslaught had been sent off-world on the campaigns to conquer Cybertron’s wayward colonies and re-link them to the Functionist homeworld. A homeworld his alternate barely visited, barely knew. The frontline was his alternate’s home. It was thanks to his leadership that the Functionists took the colonies Gorlam Prime and Devisun. The archives described the affairs that conquest were so flush with; the Cybertronian occupying forces had deported the mechanical inhabitants of both colonies back to Cybertron for assignment into classes, killed the organics, and hijacked the colony’s resources. His alternate was a highly valued officer. Brawl was listed as one of the top soldiers in his personal unit. They were rarely assigned apart on deployments.

Both of them had been offlined by the second-to-last campaign in the Colony Wars, an invasion of Eukaris. Their bodies were torn apart and never recovered.

There was a picture of his alternate on his entry. His visor was a polished yellow, like Onslaught’s visor had been once. His alternate had never fought in the Simanzian Dawn and gotten his optics smashed and most of his face torn off by a stray shell exploding, leaving it a mass of energon and exposed circuitry. The only replacement optic lenses in his frame size the Decepticon medics for the deployment on that section of the ravaged front had on hand were red. Onslaught hadn’t corrected the switch.

His alternate had been sparked to war and died in war.

Vortex… Unlike Brawl, Onslaught almost couldn’t find any mention of Vortex, until he came across an off-handed comment thread that mentioned a recording housed on one of the Anti-Vocation League site archives now that they could upload their saved data to the public networks without the government wiping it and tracking down the identities of the Cybertronians behind the uploads. It was a data packet of executions conducted by a cluster of rebel splinter groups. Vortex of New Helex had been a murderer turned Functionist thug, one of their finest. Vortex didn’t believe in Functionism, but a government that had use for his talents was quick to apply them. He had been captured by one of the anti-Functionist uprisings and executed. Cleanly. The list of the sentient being rights violations and the tortures committed by him the executor read out to him were extensive.

Onslaught found himself entertained by the alternate he caught audio snippets of from the recording. That was Vortex to the core, to have his last words be along the tune of telling his executors to go frag themselves.

Vortex wasn’t afraid of the Pit.

Swindle’s alternate had gotten on the bad side of authority with his criminal activities and general distaste on principle for strict government oversight over the market one too many times, selling to the rebels and the government alike, and fled off-planet on a hastily-paid-for ship to the conquered colonies years ago. The self-serving cyberweasel had disappeared into the underworld and nothing in the archives mentioned what became of him. Slippery to the last.

Blast Off of New Altihex had been working at a space station on Luna 2 shortly before the time of its sale, and had been killed due to his obsolescence chip being detonated as part of one of the mass recalls by the Council. Onslaught only found him in the archives because his death was relegated to a footnote, a single name in a long list of dead shuttles. He had lived a quiet life, conjunxed with an unremarkable mech who worked in a small energon refinery on the left side of the moon, and never make an indication in public he had a desire to refuse the duties expected out of him. He had rumoured connections to organized crime attached to his entry, but little else.

He and the alternate Onslaught‘s paths hadn’t crossed.

Onslaught decided to feel something about that at a later date.

Blast Off's alternate probably wouldn't have minded this quiet world without war. Would Onslaught's alternate feel the same? Or would he have been as adrift as Onslaught was? His own alternate had led the life Onslaught had once assumed would be his. War until the day he offlined. War, the natural state of the universe. But their war was over.

Sometimes Onslaught wanted to take the nearest mech and shake them until they rattled. Everybody kept _saying_ it, the war is over, the war is over, and expecting him to believe and play along like they weren’t stating the impossible. Peace? That had to be a bad joke. They had fought for eons. There had always been a war. Surely there always would be. If one ended, another ought to replace it soon enough. To act otherwise was like claiming that gravity no longer applied or like calling the DJD merciful.

He wanted the comfort of retreating into plotting attack formations and readying supply lines and prisoner raids and troop movements, transporting supplies and soldiers from Point A to Point B. He didn’t want to spend his time worrying over if they would be able to pay rent or work a job where boredly tossing the latest uppity drunkards out of the bars’ door or breaking up a brawl was the highlight of the day.

Certainly, it had been war, everybody had been trying to kill them and trying to do so in deadly seriousness but they’d been _open_ about it.

He had known where all his enemies were. Everything had narrowed down to the fight. His team versus the world. There had been nothing else. Everything else was tossed to the wayside, a lesser priority. Onslaught had known where he stood and where his team stood, even that demanded he maintain a constant background awareness of the moving gears of the war and its many theaters and which fronts were losing and which ones were winning. That had meant he could coordinate himself into a position in relation to all the rest of the cosmos and the enemies in his way. There had been logic. Purpose. Peacetime made no sense.

Peace.

What good had peace ever done him?

Peace left Onslaught directionless and he hated it.

**////**

The door beeped before sliding open as the visitor put in the codes.

The shuttle curled on his side on the berth with the lights dimmed down, drowsily staring at a datafeed on his HUD without reading a word of it, jerked and snapped his mask back into place and rolled over when the shadow of Onslaught’s bulk loomed over him. Blast Off’s armor plating tightened, clamping close to his body submissively. After a moment, he forced himself to retract his mask and leave his face bare again.

“Sir? Is there…” His vocalizer clicked, resetting itself, as he searched his memory banks for any chores he might have missed doing this evening before retreating to his berthroom that he needed to be taken to task for. “Is there anything you need me to do?”

“No.”

Onslaught sat down on the berth. It creaked. Blast Off locked up. Armor scraped against metal. The slab was smaller than the double recharge slab they’d shared in the dream Blast Off had showed him, but that merely meant it took some clever extra maneuvering to strategically move them around so Onslaught was laying on his side half beside Blast Off, half curled around him with a heavy leg flung over Blast Off’s thigh. The wheels tucked into the back of his legs laid on top of smooth metal. Pressed up against him to avoid getting shoved off the platform, Blast Off’s visor stared at him, blown wide and pale.

“Onslaught?”

“Tell me that you don’t want me here,” Onslaught said, tracing the edges of his chest plating with blunt fingers. “I’ll get out.”

Blast Off’s hands hovered, uncertain of their welcome, before tentatively wrapping around his midsection when Onslaught didn’t forbid the touch. Onslaught ex-vented as Blast Off buried his face into his chest and made some incoherent mumbles against the flat, dark blue surface. “That didn’t sound like a request for me to go.”

The shuttle shuddered.

It racked him from helm to feet.

“It… It wasn’t.”

Onslaught hummed and nudged at him, settling down and making himself comfortable, putting an arm under him and Blast Off adjusted how his frame was spread out on the berth to accommodate.

Blast Off’s hands stayed in place. That was all. Blast Off presumed his liberties extended no further than that. He touched nothing else, clutching at the cannon turrets mounted on Onslaught’s back and stayed quiet. He didn’t say a word, so Onslaught didn’t need to tell him to be silent. Onslaught rested his chin on top of his helm so he didn’t have to look at his teammate’s face. The shared heat generated by the closeness of their frames branded itself along his front.

Blast Off cried without a word too, making choking noises that he kept trying to bite back, air filtration vents clamped shut, and his visor sparking hot ribbons of light until he hiccuped himself into recharge.

Lying awake in the dark for a long time after the tiny thrumming and whirring of Blast Off’s mechanisms and moving parts had cycled down into the levels of deep defragment, Onslaught stared at the wall and flatly wondered why he decided to do this to himself.

Could he blame it on residual after-effects of the removed edits? Unlikely. Or the gestalt bond, eagerly pinging at the counterparts for its coding in the other mech, grasping at the thinnest pretense for gaining connection, intimacy? He should have gone to his own berth. He should have let Blast Off wallow about the consequences of his mistakes alone. It was what Blast Off deserved. Blast Off _admitted_ he too thought he deserved to be shunned and sent away.

But Blast Off’s frame was warm and comfortable curled up against him, and Onslaught was wearying of spending his evening dredging up the inventory of reasons he had to be angry at him. At this.

He recharged.

**////**

Watching Blast Off trying to make attempts at amends with Vortex was like watching somebody dance around and coax a cat to like them no matter how much disinterest in accepting said coaxing the cat radiated at them.

After Brawl, Swindle had been the Combaticon quickest to lay off throwing Blast Off dirty looks. A degree of private understanding, and the occasional pangs from weld lines on his chest and on his back reminded him Starscream had a silver glossa well-suited to selling mechs on schemes that sounded like they had a greater profit margin on paper than they did in action. Blast Off wasn’t a plotter. Swindle knew it was Blast Off’s preference to take orders and leave coming up with the attack plan to others. No wonder Starscream had played him like a fiddle. Swindle was familiar with how scamming somebody worked. You needed charm, a coating of gloss, a sprinkling of emotional appeal, bait just good enough the customer didn’t balk at the little catch in the deal until it was too late to back out. Fear was good too. You could work a splendid scam by making customers afraid to think about what would happen if they didn’t buy the product.

He could appreciate a good one: this appreciation didn’t apply when _Swindle_ was the one of the group getting scammed. (What? No decent cheat likes getting cheated _back_.)

Caminus had been the closest brush he’d had with deactivation in awhile.

Starscream’s gun had been the culprit.

So, Swindle got why Blast Off had fallen for the same thing Swindle had and landed himself over his helm in hot oil. He _got_ it. He didn’t like it, no sir, but he got it anyway. Blast Off, of course, had a problem Swindle didn’t in regards to what he and Starscream had done: like always, he pined after Onslaught’s regard in a way Swindle… really, really didn’t for the Camiens. He certainly hadn’t had to go _live_ with the bots after the dust cleared and Menasor had been locked up.

Blast Off cared about Onslaught’s opinion of him and cared about upsetting him. Meanwhile Swindle was just rueful over the lost business opportunities amidst the Camien part of the population on New Cybertron. (Because of course, in the last act of his reign Starscream had to go and tell everybody in Iacon about _that_. Pity.)

There was a reason he had split from the Combaticons before—Onslaught’s little obsessive spiral without a war for him to fight hadn’t been subtle and neither had been his search for a replacement, and Vortex and Brawl hadn’t been that keen on life as civilians. It spelled trouble. Swindle had cut his losses and left. Because it wasn’t worth it to pine over what they’d been in the past. Peacetime promised openings for things the war crushed. Swindle fully intended to secure an enjoyable and successful future for himself, screw Megatron and Prime’ posturing alike, and if his teammates hadn’t been willing to play ball, well, too bad for them. It was their loss, not his.

Blast Off had stayed and tried to salvage what he could. (Blast Off was his own brand of greedy and the future he wanted wasn’t possible without Onslaught along for the ride.)

And this was where they had wound up anyway.

He and Blast Off hadn’t been particularly close before—Blast Off had gravitated to Onslaught’s side, even if he was disagreeing with him in arguments, and Swindle and Onslaught were prone to being at odds. But now… Swindle found it strange to know without a vocal admission that Blast Off hadn’t wanted the war back, same as him. By-product of the gestalt bond, he supposed. Just like the itch under his armor and the ability to locate any of his teammates from miles off if he tried to. It was easier to ditch the dirty looks, with that common ground.

Vortex wasn’t so inclined to drop it. Vortex’s anger had cooled since the first months. But an increasing absence of hostility from the helicopter wasn’t the presence of forgiveness. Vortex had been with Onslaught’s team the longest of them all and took threats to it and Onslaught’s authority poorly. He had a long memory, and a mech who got on his bad side without patching matters up could put years between themselves and the incident only to come out of recharge one morning to find a nasty revenge had caught up with them.

Blast Off showed up and made passes at opening terms with Vortex and tried to figure out how to convince Vortex to give him an opening. Blast Off had some pride left. He didn’t want to _grovel_ for it.

Vortex didn’t give him an opening.

 _Luckily_ for them, Swindle was on hand and for once in his lifetime, felt like being a helpful teammate. A teammate who wanted at least ONE front in the cold war between his gestalt-mates to close.

A moment to take Blast Off aside and point out the coordinates to an energon goodie shop in the nearby city that just ever so happened to sell a very specific mixture of fuel additives that Vortex had a taste for that had been unavailable for the past three million years on the old Cybertron due to the war shortages. A moment with Onslaught to volunteer to take an extra shift (which he promptly spent with Blurr anyway, just because it cranked Ons’ gearstick hard the wrong way) just long enough for Blast Off to take off for there unnoticed. A couple of excuses to leave Vortex and Blast Off alone in the apartment for a bit.

That was all that was needed: Swindle didn’t need to spend a shanix. Blast Off did the hard lifting.

Now, watching Vortex eat the energon treats and listen to Blast Off stiffly invite Vortex to go flying with him later without Vortex _immediately_ rebuffing the olive branch the shuttle was putting out, Swindle allowed himself an unseen smirk.

Sometimes not all the rewards of pleasing clients who didn’t know they were clients were tangible ones.

**////**

Brawl was roughly popping the last dents out of Blast Off’s scruffed armor when Onslaught stomped downstairs.

“That should do it!” Brawl declared and smacked him on the back. He scooted back on the couch, checking to see if he had missed any Blast Off couldn’t reach. Nursing a bruised jaw and trails of energon from his nose dried tacky and pink on his lips, Blast Off nodded. A nanite patch was pasted over the fracture lines in one of the glass panes mounted on his forearms. He closed his mask and twisted to face Brawl. He halted when he saw Onslaught standing behind Brawl’s back, arms crossed.

Onslaught raised an optic ridge, bemused.

“Thanks, Brawl. I’ll get going now. I have a repair box in my quarters,” Blast Off said and rose from the cushions.

“No problem—hey, Onslaught!”

Blast Off gave Onslaught a polite arms-length of distance as usual when he walked past him and vanished through the doorway. Vortex sauntered into the room from the cooking area, a knowing shine in his visor. Onslaught might have suspected this was his work, except if Vortex had been the culprit, Blast Off would have been bleeding in many more places. And missing fingers. And unconscious. (And Vortex hadn’t seemed especially... _annoyed_ at Blast Off lately anyway.)

“What happened?” he demanded of Brawl.

“Huh? You mean, with Blast Off?”

Onslaught tapped a foot and resisted the desire to shoot Brawl. “Who else around here got themselves smashed up?”

“Oh, okay, Blast Off was off shift, just sitting at a table by himself and broodin’, then Shadowstalker shows up and goes over to his table,” Brawl gestured animatedly with his hands. “I couldn’t hear anything from where I was standing, but they got to talking and Blast Off’s acting like, weird, you know how he’s been lately, then the Tankors walk in, and Tall Tankor starts getting in his face, fuse-blowing mad, sticking his finger at him and Shadowstalker’s still saying something to him, and Blast Off—”

Unable to resist, Vortex broke in cheerfully. “So Octane says _whatever_ he does and Blasters stands up and socks him in the face. Right in the _bar_!”

“Blast Off punched somebody?” Onslaught said.

“I wanted to join in, but orders said not to.” Brawl said glumly. He slammed a fist into his palm. “Me and Tex kicked them out.”

“The Tankors and Blast Off beat the slag out of each other in the street before a couple goody-goodies waded in and pulled them off each other,” Vortex fanned his rotors up and down. “Then we dragged Blast Off back here once Brawl got off his shift and Brawl decided he needed fixing.”

Onslaught mulled that over. “I see.” He left the room. And the incident would have been dropped there if not for the door chime going off two days later. Brawl answered the door and found the Tankors on their doorstep.

“Yo, Brawl,” greeted Tall Tankor while Fat Tankor asked, “Is Blast Off in?”

Brawl’s cannon barrel heated up slowly. He loomed: the Combaticons could rip on Swindle for getting shot or on Blast Off for messing up all they liked. It was a different story when outsiders did it. “Yeah. Up in his room. The Pit do ya’ want with ‘im though?”

Tall Tankor flicked his wings. “Nothing bad. We wanted to see how he was doing but he changed his comm frequency since the last time he gave it to us, so we can’t call him.”

From the couch, a tendril of attention Vortex spared from stacking up his tower of empty soda cans on the table buzzed along the bond and asked Brawl who was at the door, and if he wanted a helping hand in peeling their faceplates off. Brawl pinged back an image capture of the Tankors. Fat Tankor looked at the windows lining the front of the apartment.

“Which one’s his room?” He asked.

Brawl reset his visor, leaned out the door, and pointed.

Fat Tankor cupped his hands and shouted up at the window of Blast Off’s room. “HEY BLAST OFF! I DIDN’T PUNCH YOU THAT HARD, MECH! GET OUT HERE!”

Brawl squawked and threatened to punch _Fat Tankor_ exactly that hard if he didn’t put a muffler in it.

And then somehow after that they talked themselves over the threshold, past the main rooms, and upstairs into Blast Off’s room. Tall Tankor explained on the way that they were pissed at the slag Blast Off pulled with them before, but the world had ended via a giant planet-eating monster with a black hole in its belly and they’d gotten to punch his face in and he had gotten to hit back pretty good, so now they were in the mood to let bygones be bygones and see if Blast Off was sailing smooth and still up for that night out on town he hadn’t taken them up on. This city from a different timeline was in much better shape than the last one. It had a more thriving nightlife, since even the alternate mechs wanted to cut loose after years of the old regime. It’d be fun.

By Decepticon schools of logic, their reasoning was flawless. Brawl couldn’t debate it.

Onslaught was in his office and didn’t deign to appear for the ruckus after Brawl privately commed him to reassure him it was nothing serious. Brawl left them to it and resumed harassing Vortex to play a multi-player fighter game with him. If the Tankors bothered Blast Off, the shuttle could comm them for back-up. Onslaught came down to refuel.

Tall Tankor and Fat Tankor soon popped back out from the room, frogmarching Blast Off between them who looked baffled at the turn of events. Onslaught looked up from the energon dispenser.

“Onslaught,” Blast Off said. “Help?”

“Haha, no,” Onslaught replied, making no move to interfere.

Brawl waved. Sandwiched in place, Blast Off gave them a plaintive look.

“Make sure to bring him back in one piece! We still have first dibs on scrapping him before anybody else does!” Vortex shouted after them from the couch, perched next to Brawl. He got a raucous burst of laughter from the Tankors and Blast Off’s protests before the front door slid shut.

**////**

“Why did you ask me to come along to this?” Blast Off scrunched one side of his visor up.

“‘Cuz Ons said I’m not supposed to shop alone with Swindle anymore, if I wanna use the team stipend, and Tex’s busy and told me to frag off when I asked him,” Brawl said. Swindle snorted. Around them, the marketplace teemed. Blast Off didn’t like the crowds. He kept quiet about it. His gestalt were only just warming to him in earnest again; he wouldn’t jeopardize that.

“Ah,” Blast Off said.

Pulling it up in his HUD, Brawl reviewed the list Onslaught had sent him after he’d said he was heading downtown before transmitting a copy to Blast Off’s HUD. “I just want to get a new cleaning rod for my back gun and a tin of degreaser, but here’s the rest of stuff we’re supposed to buy.”

Swindle put in, “We’re stopping by the spaceship port in the eastern sector too. I need to pick up a few packages I ordered from Vos.”

Blast Off scanned through the list. “New sponges, three dataslugs, thermal blankets, two cans of polish and wax… When did we run out of polish? I know our old sponges were done for, but there was a can of polish in the washracks last night,” Blast Off counted them off on his fingers as he muttered. His side of the bond shut, Swindle whistled innocently. Blast Off frowned behind his mask. Onslaught couldn’t have added the last item on the list. That had be an edit. “Brawl, why are four seasons of Mighty Metaliko on here?"

“Don’t you own all of the seasons’ downloads already?” Swindle said.

“The downloads from our timeline!” Brawl defended himself. “This Cybertron’s got a bunch of alternate seasons ‘cuz the original writer’s alternate got shot in the head and dumped into a factory furnace and smelted down earlier than it happened in our war, so a bunch of new guys took over and kept the show going. That’s four hundred and eighty-five episodes I’m missing.”

Swindle snickered. “Did the new guys get smelted down too?”

Then they moved to the side of the roadway for a moment as Roller and Grapple drove past, followed by Lightspeed, a pair of minibots hanging onto his hood. One of them was shouting something about football into his companion’s audial.

Blast Off had no idea what football was.

A cluster of those strange MTOs with a simply excessive number of alt modes trailed like oversized ducklings behind Wheeljack—who was pointing out to them the detailing shop, and the furniture store, and there’s the place where people get their paintjobs—before the Combaticons were past them and Wheeljacks’ voice faded out of audial range behind them. Around them on the street, mechs bustled and shouted. A transit rail-line roared overhead. (Perhaps to an organic or a similarly short-lived lifeform, the sight would trick them into thinking nothing was wrong. But in comparison to four million years ago, the numbers of Cybertronians passing by was… less than impressive. Whittled down.)

Walking next to Swindle and Brawl, letting their bickering wash over him and the buzzing of the crowds recede into white noise, the tension in Blast Off’s shoulders eased by small increments. This way, he could be close without them pushing him away. This way, he wasn’t alone.

**////**

“You’re not going to let me drop him out of the sky after all,” Vortex said.

Onslaught made an irate ‘shoo’ gesture at him. Did Vortex think these heating bills were going to fill themselves out? “Get your aft off my desk. And where did you get that idea into your processor? I haven’t said anything about taking Blast Off off probation.”

Vortex sucked in a deep, forlorn vent then let it out.

“Uh-huh. Probation, _shabation_. Pfft. You’ve been putting it off and putting it off. That speaks for itself. If you were going to kill him or drive him off, you’d have done it by _now_. I’ll be realistic. Get it together and make him a functional member of the team again!” Vortex clapped his hands together. “I’m sick of his moping. I want the old him back.”

Onslaught pinned him with a stare. “Is that so.”

Vortex said, “If he’s sticking around, I prefer the Blast Off who told me off for ‘disrupting’ his ‘ _valuable_ personal time’ over the one who I _swear_ to Vector Sigma spends most of his time acting like a skittish techanimal. It’s no fun to rile him up anymore. I don’t care how the frag you do it, get him working right again.”

Vortex swung his legs and made a show of hopping off the desk. Onslaught said, “I don’t need my subordinates to tell me how to solve my problems.”

“Could’ve fooled me,” Vortex deadpanned and left.

The problem: the notion of love and the emotions one assumed to go hand-in-hand with it. The question centered around something like this: was Onslaught going to let Blast Off go? No. Was he going to forgive Blast Off? … Not now.

He didn’t know if he could love Blast Off because he hadn’t considered it before. Without the edits, he hadn’t once looked at Blast Off with the fancy of making Blast Off his lover. Blast Off had already been his; why think about taking what already had Onslaught’s name stamped on it? Romance was a distraction from the big picture. It had no place in combat. It clouded mechs’ judgement. It had certainly clouded his.

There had been more pressing things to concentrate on during the war.

Sure, he wanted to ‘face Blast Off. So what?

It was the province of prudes or the boringly naive to think you should only frag a mech if you were in love with him. Onslaught fell into neither category. He didn’t make a habit of taking lovers: Onslaught had better things to do with his time. If he wanted to burn off charge or use up the adrenaline from battle, there were casual frag partners aiming for the same thing or favors other Cybertronians owed him he could call in. They had wanted what he wanted: an attractive frame and a functioning set of interface hardware. No strings attached. They met, they ‘faced, and then he told the mech to get out and go back to his own room, if Onslaught bothered to wait until they were in his room to do it.

He hadn’t let any stay the night. To unguardedly and routinely share his berth for the night was an intimacy Onslaught considered one did with a lover. Until Blast Off, none had captured his enduring interest.

Could he learn to love Blast Off?

He didn’t know. A question he couldn’t pretend to answer, something to be left for the future.

Could he learn to _trust_ Blast Off again?

A vastly more important question. And a question Onslaught _could_ have answered. Now that the edits were gone, he could deal with wanting Blast Off, even if that wasn’t love. He could work with Blast Off on the team without being in love with him. But he couldn’t do it without trusting him to have his back.

**////**

He didn’t need to corner Blast Off. The instructions were blunt, the coordinates attached to the comm message no great stretch to reach. Onslaught waited at the lookout and Blast Off came straight to him.

“You’re on time,” Onslaught said, leaning on the guard railing.

The metal beyond the railing dropped abruptly off into the crags of a cliff. The view of the city heights from the lookout was sweepingly vast. Layers of machinery and street lanes, speedways flashing with a glut of headlights and tail-lights running past, and towers raising high out of city blocks extended for miles in intricate tangles. Steel transit bridges jumped the wide curves of traffic and off-ramps snaked away from roads to link them together. Whorls of intersections overlapped and circled traffic one way and then another. The city glowed like an ocean of lanterns. At night, the streetlights would add to the glittering display.

It almost made one forget about the hundreds of work crews teeming in each of the distincts, all the way down to the center of the city, stripping away the markers left by the Functionist regime.

Every city standing on the surface of New Cybertron was in a similar state. Demolition experts found no shortage of buildings the new government wanted knocked out and renovated. The government was looking to the future. Mechs wanted work, the government wanted the reminders of the old regime scrubbed off. Their needs met in the middle. The Constructicons were probably besides themselves with joy at how much license they were being granted as both individuals and as Devastator to wreck as they pleased uncovered emputera-procedure centers and cold constructed labor camps into piles of smoking rubble. It would take centuries for them to run out of sites.

Even as Onslaught watched from his vantage point, a lone billboard brokenly proclaiming **TA-- PRIDE IN ----G A COG I- --- MACH--E** next to one of the roads below came crashing down. Its screen spit arcs of electricity. Mechs swarmed it, pulling it apart into scrap so they could build something new out of it.

“You don’t have much patience to spare for suffering people who drag their feet. This spot is new. I don’t think it existed on our Cybertron,” Blast Off replied from behind him. “Have you come here before?”

“On occasions. The clear view makes surveying the surrounding terrain easier and it has a minimum of interlopers to bother me if I come at the right time of day,” His tone was measured. Onslaught didn’t turn around to look at him.

Blast Off came up to the guard railing next to him carefully, curling a hand around the cold metal. “Of course that would be appealing to you.”

“Heh,” Onslaught huffed.

In mutual silence they stood there and watched vapor trails spilling out like banners behind the fliers darting in the sky over the road network. The flightframes swooped fearlessly around repurposed air balloons and non-sentient transport ships.

Blast Off’s vocalizer clicked as he reset it. “You… wanted to talk.”

Onslaught looked straight ahead of him without turning his helm to look at the shuttle. “I’ve been taking stock of the situation. You don’t need to do all the chores around the apartment. The others will get lazy if you take their share of the workload from them, and I wouldn’t have that. Not being in a military’s ranks is no excuse to get sloppy.”

Blast Off nodded, uncertain.

“Okay?” Picking up after the rest of the gestalt had been one of his wordless overtures of guilt and having permission for its continuation explicitly revoked made him feel like they were stepping onto ground he might not know how to navigate.

Retracting his mask, a sigh gusted out of Onslaught. His bright red visor finally looked at Blast Off in the face.

“That dream of yours,” he said. _The house, the job, the shared recharge slab_. Blast Off jolted. Onslaught asked. “Before the shadowplay, did you _seriously_ think that was how it was going to play out once I finished tearing down Starscream? Everything would simply come together perfectly without you having to make the first move?”

Blast Off nearly ducked his helm before he set his jaw, forced his chin up and faced Onslaught without flinching and looking away.

“It was a fantasy,” his hand gripped the guard railing, warping it into the impressions of his fingers. “I’m not stupid. I knew life wasn’t that ideal in reality. Especially for people like us.” His tone softened. “It was just something happy for me to escape into.”

“So that’s a ‘no’,” Onslaught said.

Blast Off stopped himself from fidgeting.

His words were tired. “After the war ended, I hoped… I couldn’t _stop_ hoping. But I’d been trying to get you to look at me like I looked at you for years. And you didn’t. You didn’t notice.” His hand went lax around the indentations twisted into the railing. “I wanted it to happen, but I didn’t want it like… What Starscream turned it into. What I did. I was weak and I took it anyway so I could pretend, but I wanted the real thing.”

He had wanted Onslaught and he had just as badly burned for Onslaught to want him _back_. By his own choice, not because of a lie.

Blast Off couldn’t kid himself about that. He had _wanted_ for Onslaught to desire him, to long for him, to be his. To stake a claim on Onslaught’s spark and have it returned. To be cherished and swept off his feet. Even if it had been playacting, even if guilt had ate a hole through the bottom of his tanks throughout it, getting a taste of that had been...—

It didn’t excuse what he’d pushed on Onslaught. Not even in the name of saving him.

Whether it had just been a little ‘nudge’ Blast Off had tried to tell himself it was or not, instead of the even worse alternative that Starscream had gone much further than what he had said he’d done, the degree of it was irrelevant. Little or big, it had still been something Onslaught hadn’t agreed to.

It was difficult to distinguish between the urge to see Onslaught stay functioning, even if he had to trap him in an illusion to do it, and the selfish hunger to be together with him. It was difficult to say where loving somebody for themselves ended and loving somebody for the sake of fulfilling yourself began. The lines muddled.

Onslaught shifted his upper body towards him, still leaning on the railing. “Would you do it again?”

Blast Off’s response was fervent. “No!”

“You won’t. Very well.” Onslaught placed his hand on top of Blast Off’s hand and let it linger, a light weight. A calculated weight. “You lost my trust. So since you’re staying, you better be prepared to work hard to _earn_ the right to it back.”

Blast Off’s gaze snapped up from where his visor had dropped momentarily and fixed onto the sight of Onslaught’s hand gripping his.

“What? Are you...”

Onslaught squeezed his hand. “Maybe it’ll take another four million years before I trust you again. Or maybe it wouldn’t. I don’t know for certain. Either way, it’s not going to be easy.”

The expression that spread across Blast Off’s face was that of a drowning mech who had just been pulled out of a pool of scraplets and onto a boat and was testing the dry surface under his feet, unable to believe it were there.

“You’re giving me a... second chance?”

“I’m not granting you clemency, Blast Off,” Onslaught replied firmly. “That isn’t what this is. But yes, I suppose you can think of it like that. This is what I’m sentencing you to, as your leader. You’ll need to prove yourself worth it.” Blast Off hesitantly let go of the railing and turned his hand over in Onslaught’s larger hand so he could intertwine his fingers around his rough digits in return.

Onslaught didn’t take back the words hanging in the air between them.

Blast Off cycled in a vent and dared venture a smile at him. It wobbled at the corners. “I think—I can live with that.” The wings on his back kibble flicked. “Do—you really want me to stay?”

The vulnerability and dawning hope seeping through Blast Off’s electromagnetic field was pathetically obvious.

He had power over Blast Off. He could crush that hope so very easily. Right now.

But resentment and anger towards Blast Off didn’t feel like the self-sustaining rush it had been once and that wasn’t why he had come here. Rage had worn itself out, spent the worst of its momentum like storm waves bashing up against a cliff. It tasted stale in the back of his intake. Blast Off laid his remorse out at his feet. Blast Off wanted to do better. Onslaught would take him up on it.

Onslaught knew there was no resurrecting what they had been before Bruticus.

But he had to stabilize what they were now—this malfunctioned mess—into something he could bear to rely on.

“I do. I hate giving up on what I want. Anything worth wanting or worth doing, I intend to do perfectly. You’ve known me for millions of years, haven’t you?” Onslaught cracked a faint half smile for Blast Off for the first time since the day they’d been tossed into a prison cell and a lie came out into the light. “Shouldn’t you know this about me?”

 

 

_**(escape velocity)**_

_The precise velocity necessary to escape from a given point in a gravitational field._

_A body in a parabolic orbit has escape velocity at any point in that orbit._

_The velocity necessary to escape from the Earth's surface is 6.95 miles/sec._

 

**Author's Note:**

> Alternative fic summaries I didn't use:
> 
> Local Combaticons Dismayed To Discover They Accidentally Switched Genres From Gritty Military Action Flick to Romantic Drama Soap Opera  
> Sudden Character Deaths In Unicron? WHAT Character Deaths?  
> Onslaught The Territorial Asshole and Blast Off's Fucked Up Love Life, Take 2: Electric Boogaloo  
> Dysfunction Junction, Gay Robots Who Are War Criminals Being Gay For Each Other In Space: The Gripping Post-War Slice-of-Life


End file.
